jail

At around six years old, I rode a hospital elevator with George Wallace. His legs had been destroyed by a failed assassination attempt and hunkered down in his wheelchair, he seemed like a nice old man. But when we got off the elevator, Mama said he was a bad man who didn't like black people. I really couldn't reconcile that smiling face with badness. If I remember correctly, he touched my hand. But Mama didn't believe he had changed for the better. History says he did, but history says a lot of things. One thing is for sure: someone shot him. Can't dispute that.

Now I sit here and I think about another historical figure: Martin Luther King, first and foremost a preacher before he was a political activist. King and Wallace are forever tied together, perhaps not just in their struggle against each other, but also in their love of God. Both quoted the bible frequently and lived what they considered a rightous life. And this makes me uncomfortable about what side Martin Luther King would favor today regarding gay rights, women's rights, and abortion. I know some of you are gonna wanna whip my ass, but I wonder if he would support any of the other issues besides racial equality that we on this site favor.

I believe in God and an afterlife but I think I am allergic to organized religion, except for the study of it. My brother and I are 2 out of 5.5 southerners never to be baptized. In the much of the south and a great deal of the black community, life centers around the church or a jail cell. I saw a lot of people come and go from both places, baptized or not. I don't know if this heavily influenced my politics; I guess so. I certainly don't come from the usual progressive family setting. My parents are not artist elites. They are very intelligent and creative but they always worked hard. Growing up, my dad lived in a southern ghetto in one room with 11 kids; my mother lived a rural life, so the empathy for poverty and the underdog ran strong in our house. Rules were made to be broken and mean people slapped (only when the occasion arose, of course). But I grew up believing that all people deserved a fair shot and backgrounds were not used to judge. This is how my parents said it.