Choices – Samhain 2020

 

Back in June when the first of the Black Lives Matter protests kicked off, a friend of mine reminded me of an incident that happened between high school and college. At the beginning of the year, I hadn’t intended to write about this one. In June, I committed myself to adding it to the queue.

 

As you might remember from “Homelessness”, that summer I was living on my own in an apartment, paying my own way with the suddenly full-time fast food job I had. I’d worked in that restaurant part-time for over two years.

 

My work history started when I was 16. A friend convinced me he could get me a job as a dishwasher at a local steakhouse where he was a busboy. It paid minimum wage. I wasn’t cut out for kitchen work. I lasted three weeks. I can still smell the miasma of wasted food piled in the thirty-gallon trash can set next to my station. I still feel the scalding plates burning my damp, uncalloused hands. I don’t know how another friend held down that same job for several years, but all due respect to anyone who can.

 

I quickly moved on to a local fast food restaurant where many of the students from my high school worked. That job was less strenuous and physically demanding. Somehow, I managed to score a position as a cashier rather than a cook, which was more than unusual. This was the early 80s. Girls worked up front, boys in back. I guess I was nonthreatening to the customers.

 

In general, I wasn’t bad at it. I showed up for my shift on time and worked when there was work to do. I could keep track of orders and could count out proper change. When things got slow, I looked for things to keep me busy, like cleaning windows in the dining room, which no one ever did. I was good enough that I eventually worked the drive-thru, which was reserved for only the best and fastest frontline crew.

 

The biggest drawbacks were that I earned a special “student” wage (below minimum) and that I came home smelling like grease. But otherwise, not the worst job I’ve ever had. In fact, other than unpredictable lunch and dinner rushes, and the occasional batch of buses that rolled through, it was a pretty easy gig, at least nights and weekends.

 

Easy enough in fact that some rainy nights we struggled for things to do even after our shift supervisors had sent home any extraneous crew. One of those nights, one when the owner’s son wasn’t working, after we’d done all the cleaning and pre-closing prep we could, an interesting conversation ensued with a supervisor. I’ll call her K.

 

I have no recollection of how it started. I just remember her saying to a number of us standing around, “Have you ever noticed we don’t have many black people working here? Ever wonder why that is?”

 

Sadly, I really hadn’t. There was one black guy from my neighborhood who usually worked frontline, just like me. Tall, about the same thin build. Non-offensive. But he was the only black person I worked with regularly.

 

One of my coworkers offered, because they don’t really eat here.

 

Which was and wasn’t true. Our cliental was predominately white but our restaurant was situated just across the tracks from the black community where two friends lived. We had black customers, just not as many as that proximity might indicate.

 

Another coworker piped up, because none of them apply?

 

That earned a dark glare from K. Oh they apply all right. I take their applications all the time.

 

Maybe they just aren’t qualified, someone said.

 

K sneered. Like what unique and essential skills do a bunch of high school students like us have? Scooping fries? Counting change? We were all teenagers. I think by this time K was out of high school but only just.

 

So, are you saying the owner is prejudiced, someone asked pointedly?

 

A kind of hush fell as we awaited her response. The owner was a city councilman and community business leader. Ours wasn’t a city where open racism was tolerated. This could be a pretty serious allegation. One that might cost a job.

 

K hesitated. I’m saying he keeps three sets of files for applications. Three very separate files.

 

Come on, I said. Really? Not sure if I believed or disbelieved.

 

In Florida, in the 70s and 80s it was hard not to encounter someone who was prejudiced. But my classmates and I had grown up in integrated schools. Sure, we had bussing and racial tensions, but this seemed like a throwback to a much different time from the 60s, which to a seventeen-year-old was ancient history.

 

At that point, K let the conversation drop. I could tell she was agitated that we hadn’t believed her, that we didn’t immediately see what she had seen. She also seemed cautious that she might have said too much. But later that night, just before we closed, she hauled me and another coworker into the office. Because she opened and closed the restaurant, she had keys. All the keys.

 

Close the door, she said. Which was a trick because this was a tiny office, barely big enough for a classic gunmetal grey office desk with drawers, a file cabinet and a chair. One of us did.

 

She unlocked and pulled open the built-in file drawer in the desk. She fished out three sets of file folders filled with applications and laid them on the desk, one from the front, middle and back of the drawer.

 

She opened the first set. These are the applications of people he would definitely hire. Take a look at them.

 

We did, not sure what we were supposed to see. One of us said that.

 

Look at the addresses, K said.

 

Then it stood out. Most of them from my neighborhood or the one right next to it.

 

She nodded, then opened the second file. Ok, these are people he might hire if he needs to but won’t if any of the people in the first file are still available.

 

We looked at them. Addresses from various neighborhoods all over the city.

 

Finally, she opened the third file. These are the people he will never hire.

 

My coworker looked at the addresses and didn’t recognize any of them.

 

I did, almost every one of them, and said so. As I mentioned in “The 2 O’clock News”, the Public Housing Authority had an unimaginative streak, naming streets and avenues for letters of the alphabet or numbers. Another handful of streets were named for flowers.

 

K asked us pointedly, what does that tell you?

 

I wasn’t sure what it told me. My mind tried to concoct scenarios that would justify what I was seeing, but I didn’t quite believe them. At the same time, I didn’t want to believe K either. I liked working here. I liked the people I worked with, although the owner was intimidating. I didn’t want anything to spoil that. And yet, seeing it right there in ink on paper made an impression.

 

K put the files away and relocked the desk drawer.

 

If you think he’s prejudiced, why do you work here, my coworker asked.

 

Because I need this job, she said.

 

Which confused me even more. Then why point it out, I wondered. K was clearly upset by what she’d noticed and needed to share it. I’m still not sure exactly why.

 

As far as I know, that conversation was never repeated again. I didn’t talk to anyone else about it. I just filed the information away and began looking at work interactions with a new set of eyes. At heart, I am an engineer, an applied scientist. I had suspicions but I wanted proof. So I watched and waited.

 

Fast forward an indeterminate number of months to the end of the summer I described in “Homelessness”. As I said, by then I was living in my own apartment, paying my own bills based on working days full-time, in the kitchen now, at this minimum wage job. Lunch was where the restaurant made its money. That and the recently added breakfast menu after a new fast food chain had bought our previous chain out. Forty hours a week of this work was both mind-numbing and much harder, especially working backline because the frontline supervisor, now the owner’s wife, didn’t cotton to males working her registers. At this point, I didn’t have much choice.

 

Toward the end of the summer my best friend, who lived in public housing, started complaining that his busboy job at the steakhouse I’d worked at before had started to go south. He’d asked to train as a waiter but the manager had refused. I think they’d also tried to restructure the way tips were shared by the wait staff with the busboys (which was supposed to be 10% of their tips but rarely was). Without those tips, the job didn’t make much economic sense as base wages were $2.01/hour. Like me, my friend needed the job, in his case to help support his household and pay for college.

 

One of the few advantages of working at this fast food joint was that a recommendation went a long way. If you were a marginally competent employee, it was trivial to get your friends hired.

 

So, I told him, if you need a job, I can get you a job where I work. We need people right now.

 

Really?

 

Sure, no problem. Just put me on the application as a reference. That’s the way it works.

 

He stopped in the restaurant the next evening and submitted an application to the night manager, who looked it over and took it noncommittally. We’ll let you know.

 

The owner did all his own interviews. Honestly, I don’t remember if he asked me about my recommendation. If he did, I know I reinforced it with as much positive information as I could.

 

Either way, my friend got a call for an interview. This should have been pro forma. The interview I had been through certainly was, as had every other one I’d heard of. It was basically a meet and greet followed by when can you start.

 

Or so I thought.

 

As it turned out, when my friend showed up, I had been just sent on break. Or I might have just finished my shift if I’d opened, as I often did at that point. Either way, I’d grabbed something to eat, so I was sitting out front at a small table about ten feet away from the booth where my friend and the owner talked. Not so close as to be able to hear every word, but close enough to witness what transpired.

 

As I ate, I kept stealing glances at their table. The owner’s back was to the counter so he couldn’t really see me. My friend could but he wasn’t looking. He was focused on the interview. Because I couldn’t hear, I was trying to read his body language to gauge how it was going.

 

At first, things seemed to be going well enough. Questions were asked and answered, the application consulted, more questions. My friend looked calm and poised, ready and capable. I started to relax. It would be really cool to work with him, and maybe have a schedule where we might get to do more together when we had time off.

 

Somewhere in there, my attention must have wandered. The next thing I knew, the owner shot up from his seat, yelling “Don’t tell me how to run my business!” And stormed off into the back. I looked at my friend. He looked just as stunned as I was. Like the few customers in the dining room were. Like all the counter help was. We were all like what the hell was that. None of us had ever witnessed anything like it. I certainly hadn’t in the two years I’d worked there.

 

I went over to the table where my friend was slowly gathering up his things. I asked him what happened?

 

He thought the interview had been going well. Then, the owner had asked him a pretty standard interview question. What do you bring to the business? That was a question I definitely don’t remember being asked, or hearing about anyone who was. But my friend was prepared and had done his homework, so it hadn’t thrown him. He was in the process of answering it when… Boom.

 

I’d seen his defeated expression on too many occasions, somewhere between crestfallen and resignation. At school, at businesses we frequented, by then at bars, where the black guy with the white guy was singled out for a little special attention, hassled for some minor thing. When the Rockledge cops would stop us and ask us what we were doing when we walked in my neighborhood at night. The time someone had rear-ended his car, driving us into the car in front of him, then hit and run. It took a nice white couple who had chased the car and returned with a partial license plate number to convince the officers that we’d been rammed into the car in front of us by the impact that gave us both whiplash and totaled his car. Or the time the deputy had pulled him over and told him in no uncertain terms to get “this piece of shit car off my road” when my friend was on his way to work. Or the time I’d gotten berated by my own father when I had brought a number of friends to his place to visit, at his encouragement, but failed to disclose that one of them was black. Or a year later, when my by then former girlfriend’s father told my friend that if he was coming around alone to see his daughter, he’d have to knock at the back door.

 

Imagine having that ore worse directed at you every day. No matter what you accomplish or who you become. No matter how much you prove yourself. (It is not a contest, Sadly, I know plenty of women and other people who could share similar or more horrific stories based on similar uncontrollable personal characteristics).

 

There was always context and subtext to these encounters, but I knew what was going on with all of them. If nothing else, because I listened to things that were said when my friend wasn’t around.

 

He didn’t have to say another word. I understood what had happened, too. I just hadn’t wanted to quite believe it because I liked this place and a lot of the people in it. But I did.

 

That late-night conversation with K in the office with the three sets of files came flooding back. As did every other troubling behavior I had noted since. The jokes, the looks, the postures and attitudes, and the tolerance of it in others. I’d been exposed to more of it on days than nights and weekends. As I said, you couldn’t grow up in Florida from the mid-60s to the early 80s and not encounter people who were prejudiced, even flat-out racist, no matter how hard they tried to disguise it. In that short time I’d never seen anything quite so crystal clear. I’d seen the teenaged equivalent of derelicts and degenerates hired on no more than an employee’s recommendation, without a twenty questions interview. White teenaged derelicts and degenerates.

 

One word sprang to mind that seemed to capture my boss’s interpretation of the situation. A word I’d heard many times before although never directed at me, because why would it be. But I wonder if it had been directed at K, or at least its implication, based on her assertiveness and her gender, not her race.

 

Uppity.

 

Ok, there’s a second word following that one in this case, but I’ll leave it to your experience or imagination to fill that one in.

 

I saw red. Deep, bloody, raging, aortic red.

 

I told my friend I would catch up with him later. I might have even seen him to the door. When I turned back to the employees’ entrance, I am sure my face was set. I knew what I had to do. I ignored the questioning looks from my coworkers behind the register. I marched straight back to the office when the owner was standing at his desk, annoyed at my interruption as I appeared in his doorway.

 

“Consider this my two-week notice,” was all I said.

 

He nodded perfunctorily like he was expecting it. And yet he was obviously still irritated as he shuffled applications on his desk.

 

I started to turn away without another word. Then he glared up at me, clearly feeling the need to say something.

 

“I’m not racist, you know,” he stated pointedly. An assertion, not a question.

 

No, I didn’t know. And I hadn’t brought it up. I guess I didn’t need to. It struck me then as now as an unintended confession. But I didn’t say anything. I just leveled an unbelieving gaze at him and left.

 

As I said earlier, I needed this job. I had bills to pay. But I didn’t need it bad enough to lay it on someone else’s back. Not like this.

 

I finished out the next two weeks, avoiding the owner where I could. The last morning that I was supposed to go in I just blew off. I was eighteen and didn’t figure I owed him. Petty revenge, but there it was. I still knew people on the night shift who would hand me my final check without question. Which they did.

 

The odd thing was, I didn’t feel good about quitting, I didn’t feel proud of it. I didn’t even feel like it was the right decision. For me, it hadn’t been a decision at all. It’s what I did because it’s what you do. Because it was right. Because there are times in the face of blatant wrongs like that, you have to stand up to be counted. And you sort out the consequences later.

 

It wasn’t a decision; it was a choice.

 

But I can’t say I wasn’t angry for having to do it. Not angry because my friend or the world put that expectation on me, because they clearly hadn’t. Angry at being put in the situation by other people’s unenlightened, benighted bigotry. Angry at a society that continued to allow it to exist. Angry that most people claimed we’d gotten past that and had moved on. Clearly not.

 

That anger stayed with me through my engineering career through the late 90s as I watched minorities and women treated with sometimes equal contempt, though by then more passive-aggressive and better disguised. But present nonetheless, sometimes in official corporate policy. Part of the reason I left engineering when I had the chance was that I couldn’t take the predominantly Neolithic attitudes in defense contracting.

 

But it wasn’t only there. In the 80s and the 90s I had micro-aggressions directed at me personally, both purposefully, mistakenly and inadvertently, at both work and school. In the early-2000s I ran across distinct anti-Semitism from an unexpected quarter, not disguised at all. Thankfully, it wasn’t as virulent as the first time I ran across it, twenty-five years earlier. It was just the first I’d heard it that direct in a long time. Which shouldn’t have surprised me much with the more subtle racism and sexism sometimes overlaid with it. Or in the 20-tweens when I had someone defend and justify using the n-word to me.

 

None of which is meant to say I am flawless. As I said, I grew up in the South, though at the time in a more moderate county (although perhaps not now). I made my mistakes and had to learn from them. There are distinct actions and attitudes that I am not proud of. I am certain I have contributed to other people’s pain. All I can say is that I’ve tried to learn from the experiences. Learn and listen.

 

Everything I’ve written so far might seem like ancient history. In writing these essays, I draw on my own experiences to make them relatable. Those I can speak to the accuracy of where as more contemporary events, I cannot always. But I can use my experiences to weigh them.

 

Let’s fast forward again to June this year when my friend reminded me of this incident. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten about it. I’ve told the story a handful of times before. I just hadn’t intended to write about it this year. What I think spurred me most was that my friend’s own brother hadn’t heard about this incident, though I might hazard a guess he knows about it now. The sad thing that says to me is that this incident might not have cracked my friend’s top ten so might not have been worth sharing, though it was worth his remembering nearly forty years later.

 

And in truth, he and his brother and his mother taught me more about their world than I could ever repay directly. They granted me a glimpse inside their lives, with patience and understanding. One small piece of a larger puzzle. An experience not everyone is fortunate enough to get. All I can do is pay the insight forward. Or try.

 

Here’s the thing. When people are as hurt and angry, as wounded as they’ve been during the recent demonstrations and protests, if you choose to refuse to consider their grievances, if you choose not to listen to why, if you choose to let their emotion overwhelm your empathy, you do so at your peril. That anger isn’t going to go away, not until the situation changes. And the situation absolutely must change. It’s what equality, equity and equanimity demand.

 

Now you can choose to believe things have changed since, say, the 60s or 70s, which some of you may not remember. Even since the 80s when this incident took place. They have, but likely not to the degree you would like to think. Don’t pat yourself on the back and say the work is done. It isn’t. Don’t rest on your laurels unless you never intend to open your eyes again.

 

Especially in the past four years as naked racism, misogyny, antisemitism, homo- and xenophobia built upon a well laid and layered anti-diversity, anti-immigrant foundation has come back into vogue. In truth, that culture of hate never went away. It was just barely suppressed enough to where our society might show some modicum of disgrace when it reared its ugly head in public. We as a nation, as a united people, have chosen to no longer feel that sense of shame.

 

When a sitting President dog-whistles to white supremacists very publicly, not once but twice and then denies knowing who they are, when he calls out the regular military to clear protesters from a public park for a photo-op, when he and his Administration promote and support a vigilante who murdered protesters, when armed militias who are his direct supporters twice shut down a state legislature that was in session after his “Liberate” message, when the President threatens to have the leaders of the opposition party indicted, when he will not commit to a peaceful transition of power, when his allies and party leaders largely remain silent out of political expediency, we take one step closer to another Tulsa, another Rosewood, another Dozier School for Boys.

 

Preventing that comes down to the choices we each make in this life. Or in three days, the choices we will make. If not for yourself or your family and friends of color then for your wives and daughters, your children and grandchildren, for anyone else you know in situations of unequal, institutional power. Make your choice as if their lives depend on it. Because sadly, they just might.

 

 

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Leadership - Fall Equinox 2020

 

 

I started this year’s essays talking about leadership. As the year slowly loses light, we shift our focus to who we want to lead us and where we want to go.

 

Twice in my life, I’ve been put in the position to either rebuild an organization or oversee its dismantling. Both times I chose to attempt the former. And both times, while I was elected to the position, in reality, no one else wanted the responsibility. I am just the kind of special idiot who volunteers when no one else steps up.

 

The first time I was in Boy Scouts as a teenager. Unlike most of my peers, I’d come to the organization late. I’d never been a Cub Scout. I’d only lasted a few months as a Webelo as I’d gotten bored because we didn’t do anything except attend meetings without much else in sight. I’d been spoiled by the brief time my father and I had spent in an organization called Indian Guides where we actually did things like camping. But by then, my father was out of the picture. He still lived locally but had made it clear that his life and mine would only intersect every other weekend at best. Less after he left for Spain.

 

Of course, my lack of commitment to Webelos meant that by the time my middle school friends introduced me to Boy Scouts, my mother was reluctant to let me join. But once she learned that she wouldn’t be responsible for getting me to the meetings and that every few months I would disappear for a weekend, she was onboard.

 

Our Boy Scout troop was somewhat bipolar. Because it served a geographic area, its neighborhoods were half sleepy middle-class bedroom communities and half old-school Florida crackers. In my subdivision, Boy Scouts were seen as leading to a single goal: Eagle Scout. It was a box you checked. It was the American Dream writ small. If you studied hard, showed discipline, accumulated the right awards and leadership roles, you would eventually be rewarded with opportunities down the road. If nothing else, it looked great on a college application. Today, we would call that privilege.

 

Not so much on the other side of the boulevard. The rednecks in our troop were more interested in practical skills than academics. Our fathers were mostly white collar, theirs were blue-collar as well as hunters and boaters and fishermen. While we were interested in merit badges like Fingerprinting and Citizenship in the Community, they wanted to learn how to camp and cook and shoot, be it a bow or a gun. In general, it came down to us wanting to learn things and them wanting to do things.

 

All of which meant on our side, activities could get pretty academic and individual. While my friends were suburbanites, I found my interests aligned more with the rednecks. I quickly discovered their side had more fun.

 

Like the space program our city largely served, our troop went through boom and bust. Shortly after I joined, the troop expanded to six then eight patrols, our fundamental grouping similar to teams. We actively considered spitting the troop in two but ended up encouraging people to join the struggling troop just north of us to relieve the pressure. Which only cast it a short-term lifeline before it eventually folded and we inherited their remnants.

 

By then we’d fallen onto hard times of our own. In the time I had gone from a member to a patrol leader to troop librarian, our troop had begun struggling, too. Through new rounds of layoffs at the Cape and general disinterest, our numbers were more than cut in half. We barely had enough attendance to justify meetings. When annual elections for the youth leadership came up, our Senior Patrol leader could no longer dedicate the bandwidth. Like many other suburbanite boys, other activities and organizations, like band and baseball, placed greater demands on his time.

 

But for me, camping had become a sanctuary. I found more peace in nature than I ever could have at home. To avoid the chaos there, I often spent whole Saturdays or Sundays with a book and a BB gun in the woods. Full weekends away were much needed respites.

 

So, before a minimum quorum, I threw my hat in the ring and won easily. I encouraged a friend who was a year younger to run as my assistant. He picked that up with ease. I knew with him to help we could turn the troop around. At the time we had several existential issues facing us.

 

First, the church where we met had become a bit disenchanted with us. We usually met in one of their side rooms but our boisterous nature had begun to clash with their restrained Methodist sensibilities, especially with our proximity to their sanctuary. But we needed a sponsor, be it a church or a school or some other organization. I remembered when we’d gone camping, we’d often met outside a little plywood shack tucked in the back of the church lot. I asked who that belonged to. Well, it was on church property but our troop had built it sometime before any of the current members remembered. Nobody had been in there in years. No one had a key. But it’s ours, right? Checking with the church, we confirmed it was. If we met there, would the church still be willing to continue sponsoring us? Reluctantly, they agreed.

 

We met one Saturday to check it out. Someone brought bolt cutters for the padlock, which we cut then replaced. Inside, the space was larger than it appeared. It was divided into two areas, a larger room, equipped with folding chairs no one knew we had. Once we cleaned it up, we found it would easily meet our needs. We discovered a number of old merit badge booklets, enough to start a real troop library, along with miscellaneous camping supplies no one knew existed. We set most of that aside to distribute to the patrols as needed.

 

The second, smaller area was a small storage room, stuffed with tents and even surplus army cots. No one knew we owned any of that. Our leaders thought the canvas was likely all dry rotted so we left it for another day. But I didn’t forget about it.

 

Now that we had a place to meet, we faced a second existential problem: Adult leadership. In order to maintain our charter, we needed a minimum of three adult leaders to sign the paperwork. At the time I took over, that was a huge problem. The sons of two of our three adult leaders were no longer active in the troop. Naturally, they were no longer interested in donating their time. The third leader had hoped to step aside as well, although his youngest son had just come of age to join. We targeted him first. Reluctantly, he agreed to stay on if we could find two more leaders. Next we managed to convince my assistant’s father, a college history professor, to sign on, a role he never envisioned himself in but gamely tried on. Which still left us one short.

 

Problem was, this was the late 70s. Like most communities, the divorce rate in our city ran about 50%. Which meant a lot of our scouts didn’t have fathers around to volunteer. My own was in Spain or California by this point. Even if he’d been local, I doubt he would have volunteered. We targeted every father around could find. No luck. We even looked into trying to get a female leader. A one or two mothers were willing. National said absolutely no way. Women could lead a Cub Scout den not a Boy Scout troop. They’d rather let the troop fold than change, which given their more recent problems should surprise no one.

 

As the paperwork deadline loomed, we went the desperation route. We approached one of our former leaders with an arrangement. If he signed on to the paperwork, we would make sure he wouldn’t have to participate. We were confident given time we could find a replacement and swap him out. Reluctantly, he agreed. It was either that or watch the troop cease to exist. He had too much attachment from his son’s time with us, and his previous leadership, to let that happen. As it turned out, before the year was up, an old member of the troop who had been away in the military returned and stepped up.

 

Having cleared that hurdle, I turned to membership. Our troop had become a shell of its former self. As I mentioned, soon after I’d joined, we’d had to split patrols, the smallest level of our organization, just to keep things manageable for the boys leading them. But those eight patrols had dwindled to barely four, maybe three of which were functional with minimal membership. If we didn’t attract more members, adult leadership would no longer be a problem.

 

For that we needed something to draw them in. I had a pretty good idea of what that might be. Up to now, our leadership had been focused on creating Eagle Scouts as one of its primary goals. While that served half of our community, for the other half it just wasn’t a big concern. As I said, ours was somewhat of a redneck troop. They were more interested in doing than learning. Not that those two things were mutually exclusive. But the approach made all the difference.

 

So, I came up with a plan, something I could sell to both halves of our community. I sketched it in my mind then approached our leaders. I said I wanted one major activity each month in addition to our meetings. A camping trip, local or distant, a canoe trip, a hike, a camporee. Something, anything I could point to that was fun. While I had ideas, I needed help with the logistics, reservations, driving rotations, contacts, etc., which at the time were beyond my ken.

 

When I laid out my agenda to our leaders, they were skeptical and a bit daunted. I tried to ease their minds. There were two major camporees our troop attended every year. That left ten more events. Summer camp, either in FL or every few years in North Carolina, were annual activities, so I counted that as another. Nine more. For campouts, I reminded them of several locations I remembered we’d visited before, one in the far north of the county, one in the far south and several in between, plus the campground of our summer camp. Add in a few other full-day trips, and we were in business.

 

My enthusiasm must have been infectious. They started adding in their own ideas. One of our leaders had a boat, as did some other fathers. Previously, we’d camped out on islands in the Indian River, which were free. Someone threw in inner-tubing down any of Florida’s numerous spring-fed rivers.  In the end, the leaders said the plan was ambitious, yet agreed to give it a try. Why not. Even as they signed off, I think they thought there were enough obstacles that it might never happen. But they were willing to feed me some rope to see what I did with it.

 

The moment I got their buy-in, I started a recruitment campaign. I began with former members who’d fallen away, boys who were still the right age and might be interested. I talked to a dozen or so former members, some older, some younger. asking why they’d fallen out of the troop. Almost universally, I got the answer that the meetings were boring and we didn’t do anything fun. So, I laid my plan before them and told them the leadership had agreed. As a sweetener, I added that after each meeting, we would reimplement some sort of game like the ones we used to play. Capture the flag was always a favorite. I got the sense many of them didn’t believe me. Why not show up for a while and see?  

 

I didn’t stop there. I knew we couldn’t survive on returning former members alone. So, I knocked on a few doors of a few friends and acquaintances who I thought might be interested but had never joined. Guys who used to run around in the same woods I did. Guys in ROTC. I talked up our proposed activities along with the current and likely returning former members they might know.  Again, I told them, give it a try. If you like it, sign on. If not, what do you lose but a little time?

 

Within a month, our meeting room was full with boys who wanted to see if I was for real. I was. We immediately started planning our first camping trip. That’s when one of our leaders pulled me aside. He counselled me on another aspect of our troop I hadn’t had to think about before. A number of our newly reconstituted patrols were filled with boys who came from neighborhoods where there wasn’t a lot of money. Unlike boys from my neighborhood, they didn’t have the fundamental supplies for camping, especially tents. And they couldn’t just tap their parents to buy them. Those were big purchases, mostly reserved for Christmas and then on layaway. Some of these kids didn’t have sleeping bags. Some used blankets, or quilts their mothers made. He advised I might need to modify my plans.

 

I didn’t. Remember when I said there was a store room in our meeting house? I said, ok, I understand. But before we scale back and lose the kids we just got, let’s check out what’s in there and see if it’s of any use. So, the first troop activity we scheduled was go through that store room. This leader tried his best to temper my expectations. As I mentioned, the tents we’d seen were canvas. He’d been in the Army. He knew dry rot was a real issue, especially in Florida, especially if any of them had been put away damp however long ago.

 

That Saturday we started pulling out tents, unrolling them and setting them up. Four-man frames, two-man pups, and one really interesting three-man version. They had some stains and smelled a little musty, but amazingly, all of them had poles and stakes. The first one we set up had dry rot in a corner at one stake loop where a pole rested. We set that one aside, forging on, now preparing for disappointment. In fact, while I directed others to keep going, I examined that one to see if there was anything to be salvaged. I spent the next half hour hand-stitching a repair with canvas thread and a needle-point needle I pressed into service, fashioning an adequate and durable if not elegant repair. As I did, report after report got called over my way. “This one’s good.” “This one, too.” “No problem here.” “Here, either.”

 

In the end, all but a couple tents we pulled out were either fine, or, like the one I nursed, needed just minor repair. A few didn’t have all the right poles or stakes but we cannibalized those from the others. By the end of the morning, we had enough tents to outfit two to three patrols as long as some didn’t mind sharing a four-man tent. All we had to do was divvy them up.

 

That led to a bit of conflict as every patrol thought they should get at least one of the big ones. I shook my head and explained. Those were going to the patrols that needed them, the ones without, not the ones that thought they would be cool but already had their own. We dedicated the pup tents to any patrol that ended up needing them on an ad hoc basis. A few kids didn’t like it, but everyone pretty much agreed it was fair.

 

But I did claim the three-man pup tent as a leadership tent for my assistant and me, which no one had a problem with, especially when I stressed the next set of leaders would get it, too. It became a kind of status symbol, exactly as I’d hoped.

 

So how did my first experiment in leadership work out? Well, that first year, we had events in ten out of twelve months, including a three-day canoe trip down almost the entirety of the St. John’s River, and a ten-mile hike into a local ranch. Not quite my goal but easily double the highest number of events we’d ever pulled off before. As well, we used each trip as an opportunity to earn merit badges and other awards that helped with our advancement.

 

At the end of that year, I said I would step aside as leader, which had always been my plan. I encouraged my assistant to take it for himself with my support. He was more than capable and ready. To assuage any fears, I said I would stay on as his assistant if he wanted, so he could rely on me if he needed to. Basically, switching positions so our overall leadership team remained intact. We were both re-elected without serious opposition. And the troop rolled on. The next year, we might have slipped to nine events. But we still had a lot of advancement in rank. Everyone was happy or at least content.

 

I score that as a win.

 

Five or so years later, I had an opportunity to put those skills to work again. At college, I’d become an off and on member of the campus Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy (FITSSFF). I’d encountered them at some point in my first couple years, and was attending meetings somewhat regularly by my sophomore year. Much like my old Boy Scout troop, I could see they were struggling. Membership hemorrhaged as the year progressed. There was a core group who were a somewhat boisterous lot that tended to put new members off. Mostly, again, as a club, we didn’t really do anything but meet and cut up. No real events, no real discussions or activities. Just kind of hanging out. Given we were all in college with science and engineering majors, most people had better places to dedicate their time.

 

By the end of spring semester, that apathy and ambivalence had begun to show. We’d started the year with maybe fifteen people showing up to meetings, including some seniors who would be graduating. We ended with five. Barely enough to qualify as a club. And even getting that many to the final meeting had been a struggle. What I didn’t know at the time was that the club president had already written a very creative club obituary to post in the campus newsletter if our final meeting came out as he expected.

 

To keep our status, we had to hold elections for club president and vice president for the next year so we could submit their names along with our current membership with our renewal forms. The problem was, of the five of us there, three refused to run, which our president knew in advance, hence the obit. Of the remaining two, which included me, this was the other guy’s first meeting. When the president opened up nominations for the next year, I looked around and said, if no one else wants it, I’ll take it. Our president looked surprised, stunned even. Done. Unanimous. The other guy took Veep. We’d survive another year. Or at least the summer.

 

This time around, I better knew what needed to be done. But unlike with Boy Scouts, I didn’t have adult leadership (I was the adult now), or a reliable second to help me (the guy we elected Veep didn’t return after the summer). But that didn’t matter. I did have our former president, now a senior, offering his help, which I gladly accepted.

 

That summer, because I was local, I crafted a plan. The first thing I wanted to do was start the year off with a bang. Every year, FITSSFF like most clubs, manned a table during freshman orientation to recruit new members. I knew it was a somewhat ineffective process. I’d skipped my freshmen orientation (much to several people’s consternation). Even if I hadn’t, I wasn’t the type of person to cruise tables looking for activities. I wanted deeds not words.

 

So, I talked to a few working engineers I knew who could put me in touch with a liaison at NASA (we were twenty miles from Cape Canaveral). I told them who I was and that I was hoping to get a speaker for my college. Ok, exactly what are you looking for? I was hoping for a subject along the lines of science fiction to science fact, which I sketched out. Let me look into it was the official reply. Eventually, they put me in touch with an engineer who said he’d be happy to speak. He just needed a projector, a microphone and a screen.

 

I scheduled the main auditorium, which seated around 300 plus (on a campus of 7000), not knowing how many people would show up. Me and the former president drew up flyers that the school activities department printed. Who knew as a club we had a standing budget with them for that? Not us until we talked to them. We crafted and hung a banner across the main thoroughfare from the dorms to the classrooms advertising it.

 

I didn’t have much hope for turnout. So I was more than astounded when I met our speaker backstage to agree on his introduction. The auditorium was well over half full. A hundred and fifty people, only a dozen of whom were former club members. Wow. That exceeded my expectations. Sadly, the speaker did not. It became apparent after he went through his first few slides that there had been a grave miscommunication somewhere. He was talking about the art on the covers of his classic pulp science fiction magazine collection. Not at all what we’d advertised. Which showed as the audience began to slowly hemorrhage as the evening wore on. By the time he’d finished, one fifty had dwindled down to fifty.

 

As he closed his talk, I stepped back to the microphone and asked people to hang out for a couple minutes. I put on a good face to hide my disappointment (and annoyance), thanking our speaker and seeing him off. Instead of returning to the microphone, I sat on the edge of the stage and addressed people directly. I am not a great public speaker, but I can do it. Somewhere in introducing myself, I stumbled over something I said, which drew a laugh, but one that I got the sense put people at ease. Laughing with me not at me. I told them who we were, gave a brief pitch off the cuff and said if they were interested to come check us out at our first meeting, giving them a time and place.

 

Again, after what I thought was a debacle of an event, I didn’t have much hope for turnout for that first meeting of the year. Once again, I was surprised when I arrived just a little early and it was standing room only. Our regular crew had ensconced themselves in the back row and began chanting my nickname as I walked in. Generalissimo! Generalissimo! Generalissimo! Our first meeting was when campus activities insisted that we take club photos, so I’d dressed the part in a fatigue jacket and a foreign legion cap with a revolutionary beard. I know I made an impression on at least one redhead in the room. But not enough of one to be first or even second in line. Dammit.

 

After a group picture, somehow, I got the meeting under control. First order of business was the remainder of our deferred elections, the results of which we had to submit with our membership list along with the club picture. By then we knew we needed a VP as well as a treasurer and secretary. A rather chaotic election ensued. Our new VP wanted to be called Il Duce. Our treasurer got elected unanimously when he came in late wearing a suit because he’d just gotten off work. He turned out to be more reliable, with more of a can-do attitude than our Veep, which worked out. I honestly don’t remember our secretary.

 

Even with all the weirdness and miscues, by the end of the night fifty people had signed the attendance list. Better than any of us had a right to expect. But I didn’t rely on sheer numbers to hold the club together. We needed to keep people coming back.

 

My first goal was to organize a mini-gaming convention once each quarter, roleplaying and wargames. When I glanced through the club’s scant archives, I found we had hosted similar ten years before. I knew we had a lot of gamers on campus and in the club so it seemed a perfect fit. Each time I never ran a game, and only managed to sit in on one due to learning crisis management, schedule adaptation and game promo on the fly. Despite none of us ever having done anything like it before, we pulled off all three, mostly based on my experience attending a couple Gen Con Souths in Jacksonville and organizing some small, informal events for my high school gaming group. All three were wildly successful judging by attendance and enthusiasm, as well as the decent attendance of our meetings. That served as a foundation.

 

We also invited members to give reviews for whatever science fiction/fantasy books they were reading after meetings. We informally discussed books and movies, and gave each other recommendations. We ended up consulting with the club’s adviser, who taught a course on science fiction, on restructuring her reading list, which necessitated a research trip to the local public library for ideas after we’d worked through very limited options in the college library. We got together informally and watched science fiction/fantasy movies that we (usually I and other officers) rented. We organized trips to the theater when new science fiction/fantasy films came around. When one of my dormmates had a meltdown and handed me all his gaming books, wargames and science fiction books because his Christian faith suddenly told him they were an evil influence on him, I accepted them and started a club library, asking for other donations, and donating every science fiction/fantasy book I read. And of course, we continued our annual ritual of showing the short film the club owned a copy of outright although no one knew how. Hand of Death. 1960s science fiction at its very best (or arguably worst).

 

In short, we did things. Things other students apparently wanted to do. We even managed to attract consistent female membership, no small trick in a genre that isn’t always welcoming or accessible to women on a campus with a 7:1 male to female ratio.

 

All of which meant that by the end of that spring quarter when we had to hold elections for the following year, we had twenty-five members show up, a week before finals.  Quite an improvement from a year earlier. Once again, I stepped aside and convinced a friend to take over. He kept things moving forward for my senior year. After I graduated, I learned the club library I’d started had grown to a point where two presidents after him got it allocated its own storeroom on campus. From humble beginnings.

 

When I looked up both organizations twenty plus years later, both had not only survived but thrived. I am sure in the intervening years each faced other crises forcing someone new to step up. I fundamentally believe that without good leadership in that critical moment, whether mine or someone else’s, either organization easily could have failed. I know in my heart that my stepping up gave them that opportunity to flourish. Because I valued them.

 

Like I currently value science, evidence, facts and truth.

 

Now, in the previous paragraphs, you read a lot of “I”. The truth is in both cases this was all a major group effort. In the first, without our adult leaders, who handled most of the logistics, without an eager, more than competent assistant, without the other patrol leaders, older mentors and rank-and-file boys willing to put in the effort, it never would have worked. FITSSFF was much the same. A lot of people chipped in with their time and effort. Without the other people in the club and one other solid officer, things wouldn’t have gotten done.

 

I don’t claim full credit for either outcome, just for having the imagination, motivation and problem-solving tenacity to convince others we could get it done. Together. And get it done we did. Sometimes people just need to be shown the way. In fact, there are a number of things I don’t remember exactly how they got done, likely because I didn’t do them. At times, things happen around me. People take up tasks that need doing, contribute contacts, attend to details I’ve missed, put out fires I never see.

 

All of which helped me when I reluctantly took on a leadership role in my engineering career. But once I did, I quickly rose from a team lead to being slated to lead multiple teams with over two dozen members and oversee a multi-million-dollar budget. And still helps me today, when I organize something as simple as a Kitten*Con.

 

Which is a long way of saying, I know a little bit about leadership and rebuilding.

 

When you lead an organization or a team, you first seek to preserve and protect it. You look out for all its members, not just the ones you like or the ones who agree with you. Not just your family, friends or base.

 

And yet, right now, we as a nation are entering a struggle for the kind of leadership we wish to see. I don’t mean that in the normal sense of a quadrennial election.

 

Although perhaps our current struggle isn’t really over leadership per se. On one side, we have someone who, while not likely to be a great leader, still wants to protect and serve the overarching organization he seeks to lead. On the other side, we have someone who, while charismatic, is a disrupter and destroyer. His record on those points is clear, at least to anyone without motes and scales obscuring their vision, purposefully or otherwise.

 

Most of my point here seems obvious, at least to me. So obvious that it’s difficult to put into words without belaboring it or sounding pedantic. By the nature of our current Orwellian environment where black is white and up down, anything I say is likely to be twisted and turned as a weapon against the idea itself by apologists and propagandists. I use those words advisedly.

 

Imagine for a moment that I had adopted that second style with either of the organizations I’d led. Now imagine I’d made it plain that I didn’t value either of those organizations at all. Imagine if instead of putting up ideas for how they could change and improve to benefit more people, all I had done was rely on pandering to a vocal few. Or imagine I’d treated the people around me the same way I’d experience in “Switching Sides”. Imagine working in that environment, with leadership who embraced it. Would either organization have survived?

 

That question might seem rhetorical or hyperbolic. And yet, I can point to interviews from decades ago outlining that this is where someone wanted us to be, with a group or party actively exploiting low voter turnout, or suppressing it, to gain a series of positions to build resumes so they could get elected to the highest offices with the expressed purpose of dismantling huge portions of the organizations they purported to lead, from local school boards to state legislatures to the federal Executive branch.

 

It was a brilliant and effective, if deeply cynical and anti-democratic, strategy. But that roadmap led to exactly where we are.

 

Back when I was a systems engineer, we tested the secure communication system our project had designed. We found that the most potent threat to its operation didn’t come from an external jammer, it was another unit in the network acting erratically. Which made sense. That errant terminal used all the same frequencies and all the same timing for its signals, it shared all the same resources and algorithms. That inside knowledge allowed it to disrupt an established, functioning communications network superbly, if in our case inadvertently, by spewing nonsense data that interfered with the otherwise orderly distribution of information.

 

The easiest way to destroy and dismantle an organization is from the inside. Which is to a large extent what we are seeing. People in power purposefully using every resource and lever within government agencies to suppress and distort the dissemination of vital information to the public, as they slowly, perhaps irrevocably, undermine and damage valued institutions central to our nation’s democratic principles, things like national security, the nonpolitical independence of scientific research, civil rights, justice, and the rule of law.

 

This is not leadership. And leadership, even merely competent leadership, is what we need to rebuild the public trust in those valued institutions and change the course we are on. And if we choose not to, may the gods of history have mercy on our souls.

 

  

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III

Belief - Lughnasa 2020

When I was young, I desperately wanted to believe in something. I wanted to belong to something, perhaps because I didn’t get that feeling of belonging at home.

My early religious instruction was pretty normal. A pastoral church out in the country, an acceptable substitute denomination when my parents couldn’t find their own, macaroni iconography spray-painted gold, feeding carrots or apples to the neighboring horses after services. I still remember the excitement of the first day I was allowed to sit with my parents and sister rather than in the daycare center the church had for younger kids.

These bucolic outings were curtailed when the Congregationalist church opened a mile from our house. But we still attended as a family off and on when my father wasn’t traveling for his job, which meant less and less often.

That changed again after my parents got divorced. My mother declared she no longer benefited from going to church, though my sister and I still would. That never quite made sense to me, though I suspect now she was looking for a once a week break from us. The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on my sister, who started ditching church like school then stopped going altogether. I wasn’t far behind. Church was a family activity. My family had disappeared.

That didn’t mean I stopped searching, even in a back-burner kind of way. Or perhaps I felt a not so subtle need to conform. But none of that was pressing.

Then came the worst year of my life. Sixth grade arrived with a new school, new friends, and new expectations, all of which was normal enough. But those changes were combined with my sister’s now full-steam rebelliousness layered with my mother struggling to find a job then working nights. Most of what I remember from that year was them fighting Texas Cage Match style, knowing that at any moment it could spill over to me and often did. I remember feeling constantly terrified and exhausted. I often wished I would go to sleep and never wake up, that God would claim me. I didn’t have some vision of unearthly fantasy paradise filled with streets of gold and choirs of angels. That’s not what Congregationalists teach. I just knew heaven couldn’t be any worse than earth. All I wanted was some peace.

About that time a new church opened across the street from my middle school. The Evangel Temple. I don’t know what denomination it was. I suspect it didn’t have one at all. No one knew what to make of them. They were new and didn’t seem to play by the existing rules. I mean who named their church a temple? Not the Lutherans, the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Catholics or even the Southern Baptists, never mind the Congregationalists. Not in the 70s, not in sleepy Rockledge, Florida. It sounded kind of Old Testament. Perhaps that should have been a clue. Yet here they were, all exciting, shiny and white.

But that’s not what grabbed my attention. Soon after opening, they started trolling the neighborhood in a brightly made up van like an ice cream truck, gathering an audience of kids with free candy, then enticing us with little Biblical puppet shows to say was how much fun their church could be. They were definitely progressive in spreading their Word, at least to our generation. They had a dedicated children’s church with its own rock band. They had a refurbished school bus that would pick us up if our parents didn’t want to attend. It was the perfect disaffected suburban setup, remarkably similar to other 70s cultural temptations. Remember, kids, samples are free.

Somewhere in my head I decided this might be a better way to spend my Sunday mornings than at home. All my friends were in church and television was a wasteland. Just Face the Nation, the 700 Club and the Bobby Bowden Show. And it wasn’t like there were any family activities in the offing, not even Sunday dinner. So, I signed up.

My mother was initially less than enthusiastic. But once the bus came around and honked its horn, she seemed onboard with my once again disappearing for several hours each week. In fact, as the shine wore off because I didn’t really make any friends in the children’s congregation or find it particularly entertaining or as comforting as I’d thought, she was the one who insisted I continue to attend.

The place was weird to me. The first thing they did each week was ask if anyone was new then drag them up on stage to be “saved.” Which I know now is a pretty standard scenario in most evangelical, charismatic and sometimes fundamentalist American Christian churches. Which, aside from making me uncomfortable, struck me as completely alien. No other church I’d been in did anything like this, especially with kids, especially without their parents around. Besides, it seemed unnecessary and redundant. I mean, I knew I’d been baptized. At least I’d seen the pictures though I couldn’t swear my parents weren’t beaming over some other random infant in a white christening dress near a font with a minister.

Plus, none of the sermons, if you could call them that, spoke to me or made much sense. None of the Bible stories were the way I remembered them. It all felt like a huge bait and switch. But as with any boring class in school, I tolerated it as I checked out and daydreamed the time away.

Then came the fateful day someone asked how old I was. I don’t remember if it was around my birthday or just a random question. Either way, thirteen was the answer. Oh, well, that’s a problem. Children’s church is for children only, meaning twelve and under. You now need to attend the regular church in the regular sanctuary. I didn’t like this idea very much. But being a rule follower, I did as I was asked. Not that it was a request. They’d given me one final week in children’s church as a courtesy. After that, the nice lady who ran the place drew a hard, red line.

The next Sunday, I went into the main sanctuary alone, which was as large and sterile as any other church I’d been in. The service was as dry and meaningless to me as any other I’d sat through, either in my previous churches or attending some of my friends’ churches as a guest. Hell, the last Congregationalist sermon I remember revolved around baseball. I’m not sure I followed the metaphor but I do vividly remember the minster examining the ball, tossing it up and down, and setting it on the podium. This was all Old Testament stories and sin as I remember. Definitely perplexing and adult, without a Virgil or Beatrice to guide me through.

But I couldn’t find a way out of it. My mother remained insistent I attend. I’d signed up so wasn’t allowed to quit. I did manage to get off the bus by saying I could ride my bike. My sister briefly went with me, but really that was just a cover for her to ditch and do something with her friends without my mother knowing. She swore me to secrecy and threatened me if I blew her in. That lasted until the day she wasn’t at the assigned meeting spot when I got out. I waited but knew when she didn’t show that I had to get home or risk my mother’s wrath. By this point, we were fighting over the lifeboats: it was every child for themselves.

I don’t remember how long I attended regular services before a family sitting down the pew from me said they’d noticed me attending alone and asked me where my family was. I told them my parents were divorced and neither my mother or sister wanted to come. They invited me to sit with them each week. I think the words “you can be part of our family” were uttered.

I may have only been thirteen but my stranger danger radar blared away full blast, red lights, sirens and everything. I went home that afternoon and told my mother I wasn’t going back. I didn’t tell her why or what had happened. She thought about trying to force me, but something in my stance and hardened eyes must have convinced her it would have been a futile effort. I was done.

So, after eighteen months, I was once again a confirmed heathen with my Sunday mornings free. That little experiment in freewill had definitely cured my itch to belong and believe, at least for a time.

That lasted until I was in high school and had a steady girlfriend. Which surprised even me. Somewhere in the time we were dating, she’d been born again outside the denomination of her birth. She was going to some nondenominational, fundamentalist church out in the sticks of Cocoa. She would tell me about her Bible study class, how great and educational it was. How we really should go together. As a couple. She’d told them all about me, which struck more than a little fear into my heart. After my earlier experience, I wasn’t particularly interested. But in the spirit of compromise and cooperation and a continuing relationship, I eventually, reluctantly agreed.

First problem. Bible study came with homework, which I wasn’t particularly inclined or interested in doing. I had a Bible. But sitting down to read it to discuss with a group of strangers wasn’t high on my list of things to do over a weekend. Second problem, the study group met before the first of two regularly scheduled services. So early, at least for me at the time, which meant setting an alarm on a day I might normally sleep in, especially after a late night on Saturday, or if I had to be at work at noon. Again, not high on my agenda.

But like a dutiful boyfriend, I did my best. For about eight weeks, I did (most) of the assigned reading and contributed to the discussion, though usually only when asked. My opinions weren’t what I’d call the standard interpretation at the table. But the group was at least different from what I’d seen before. The people seemed mostly ok. Though I had my doubts about the guy who would show up bright and early in a tie one week, late in a t-shirt and perhaps hungover the next, miss the next two or three meetings completely, then rinse and repeat. And the group treated it like nothing ever happened. Which struck me as pretty odd.

After the study group, my girlfriend and I attended the main service together. She seemed quite happy with the whole arrangement. At some point I realized she was showing me off, which I wasn’t sure I minded. While it wasn’t my favorite couple’s activity, the congregation was too conservative and literal for my taste, I could generally deal with it. Or so I thought.

Which lasted until a particular Sunday morning. We were sitting in the center of a long row of pews, about mid-distance front to back. Hard, polished wood pews as I remember. No pad or carpet like the Evangel Temple, which seems opulent by comparison. We had gone through the ritual of turning forward, back, and side to side to shake all our neighbors’ hands. It was springtime in Reagan’s newly minted America. Which cast us, I suppose, as the shining city on the hill.

The minister immediately launched a fiery sermon on the perils of premarital sex as a wage of sin. Living in the era of Just Say No, this rolled right off me. It was pretty standard rhetoric. I’d heard it all before. As far as that sin went, there were bigger worries in the world in my mind. In fact, I wasn’t really paying much attention at all.

Right up to the moment he added, “any woman who has sex before marriage is damaged goods in God’s eyes.” That caught my full and undivided attention. Had I just dropped back fifty years and landed in a church Pleasantville? Had my technicolor world just changed to black and white?

At first, I didn’t take his statement seriously. A smile might have tried to curl the corners of my mouth. I thought it was a provocative setup line for a twist that would lead to the real sermon. That had to be it. As I glance around, that nascent smile emerged stillborn. Everyone in front of me was nodding. These people were dead serious.

“Damaged goods.” The minister repeated that phrase for emphasis, with a pause for contemplation. Like women were precious cargo in their God’s eyes. Possessions not people.

I glanced at my girlfriend to check her reaction. She had a rapt expression fixed on the pastor as she nodded gravely, too. I quickly refocused forward, stunned, surrounded, my stranger danger blasting a red alert again. Understand that in our relationship, that ship was no longer tied up at the pier. It’s not like she and I had embarked on a different journey in that regard. Neither of us had sailed alone. Except I wasn’t damaged in her God’s eyes. She was. Not me. Just her.

Which made me wonder what kind of self-hating, hypocritical relationship I was in. If I had been alone, I would have walked out on the spot. I was that repulsed. As my anger curdled, I almost did. Instead, I donned a mask, not wanting to make a scene, working through the rest of the service from the safety of its disguise. On the drive home, I told her I would never go back. If she was comfortable accepting that kind of judgment knowing she didn’t conform to their God’s expectations and never could, that was her choice. Personally, I thought treating women like that was bullshit, albeit an ironic, artistic exclamation point in the statuary garden of the golden calf.

I am pretty sure that’s where our relationship began to founder, though it took another year or so to break up on the rocks. Looking back, that was for the best.

This time, I only kept free and clear from religious entanglements for another couple years. Once again, my return had to do with a girl. Two girls in fact.

The first was a friend who was two thousand miles away when she told me she’d attempted suicide. The second was in the campus Christian group my born-again roommate introduced me to for solace when I told him. She, and they, seemed different from the Christians I’d been around up to then. More caring and honest. Though still on the strange side of metaphysics in my mind, especially as an aspiring engineer.

Long story short, this girl was generous, kind and pretty. I liked her. I thought she liked me. I wanted to see where it might lead. That yellow brick road is paved with good intentions.

Where it ended up was in a tent revival, which is like a southern rite of passage as I understand it. I’d never been to one. Given what I’d seen and heard in the past several years, I figured I could handle it without a problem. How bad could it be? Once again, my estimation and reality didn’t quite intersect.

A tent revival is a lot like a circus sideshow. There’s a striped canvas tent setup in an empty lot on the outskirts of town. Inside there are row upon row of white folding chairs with an aisle down the center facing a platform stage. There are ushers, men, in long-sleeved button-up shirts who look a little like bouncers at a strip club. There is a local barker to warm up crowd and draw them in before the headline talent hits the stage. All this happens after dark.

Revivals are itinerant and somewhat mendicant. They travel from place to place, often in an established circuit, advertising their arrival at various evangelical and charismatic churches. Sometimes the headliners end up as a guest ministers or speakers in a local church, but more often not. Theirs is a particular talent more suited to Saturday night than Sunday morning. Some bill themselves as healers or miracle workers, others as speaking in tongues or any variant of being inhabited by the Spirit. Most are just fiery, inspired speakers who know how to work an audience, which ranges from small and intimate to local carnival large. It is a very strange ecosystem that inhabits the margins of society like a tidal pool.

It’s important to remember these speakers are old-school religious showmen. People turn up to be entertained as well as to be saved or renew their faith. While all are welcome, most know what they’re in for and exactly what to expect.

I didn’t. But I quickly learned. The dialog and narrative structure were novel to me, although as the night progressed, I found the plot points very familiar.

The first trick to showmanship is anticipation. You always make your audience wait. So, a 9 o’clock kickoff time drifts closer to 9:15-9:30. Bearing in mind this is springtime in Florida, so while not Amazonia hot, definitely not what you’d call cool. Pack a hundred or so bodies into a plasticized canvas tent and draw the flaps and it gets downright warm. Not quite uncomfortable, just bordering on giddy.

I don’t remember all the particulars of the how the evening unfolded. The lights were low to set the mood. There wasn’t a microphone, though it wasn’t a big space. An usher guarded the entrance with another at the stage entrance to outside and maybe a third stationed somewhere in front of the stage. There was a local warm-up act who gave the introduction. There was some sort of fiery sermon with allusions to the devil walking among us with his temptations and the punishment that awaited us should we yield. Like every religious service I’d been to, at some point they passed a plate. All of which built toward the highlight of the evening: the call for salvation.

At some point the speaker asked a series of questions. Who had never been here before? Who had a problem the Holy Spirit could address? Who needed to renew their faith? Who had never been saved?

For me, these were all rhetorical questions I had no intentions of answering, or even stirring for as they were asked. I knew what was coming from the Evangel Temple. While I was in the audience voluntarily, I had no desire to make it more than a spectator sport. I didn’t remember hearing a portion of my grade would be based on participation. So, I sat impassively with my arms tucked across my chest watching the spectacle unfold.

Unfortunately, the girl I was with didn’t get the memo. She must have raised a hand and pointed at me behind my back. Suddenly, there was an usher at the head of our row, beckoning to me.

I should have shaken my head and refused. But again, there was a girl involved, one currently encouraging me to accompany this guy. Against my better instincts, I went along.

He guided me up on stage, to the end of a line of half a dozen others. The preacher made a show of more build-up, dragging a last couple stragglers up to join us. At this point, I wasn’t really paying attention because I really didn’t want to be there.

Once he was done with the preliminaries, the preacher started at the head of line. He stood before the first individual, looked them in the eye, then raised a hand and pressed it hard against their forehead, pushing back quickly with a loud, “Be healed” at the moment he made contact. That individual fell back as if they’d fainted into the waiting arms of one of the burly ushers who helped them to their feet and guided them shakily offstage.

The preacher moved down the line, bam, bam, bam, felling individuals one after another like a row of yellow pines. Like a trust exercise at a team-building seminar, each was caught by an usher who assisted them back to their seats. You could see the preacher’s performance was gathering steam. This was why the audience was here.

When he came to me, he gave me that same long, meaningful look into my eyes but didn’t say a word. I assume he thought I knew the script from those who came before. Maybe the first person in line was a ringer to show us the way. Except I’d been through similar before. While I had no intention of disrupting his performance, I also had no desire to participate unless I felt so moved.

“Be healed.” When his palm connected with my brow, my head rocked back. But I felt no spark, no spirit, no knee-buckling euphoria. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to feel something, maybe even hoped to. But there was nothing. So, my head just snapped back forward.

The preacher’s eyes narrowed as his expression flashed between annoyance and outright anger. I just met his gaze levelly before I was grabbed firmly by the arm from behind and hustled back to my folding chair, now more than a little scared. These guys were truly upset that I had ruined their show.

The whole affair wound down quickly after that. As we spilled out into the night, I did feel somewhat reborn, not in spirit but in clarity. After seven years, I’d finally peered behind the curtain and seen the show for what it was. Needless to say, my performance didn’t make a good impression. I didn’t get the girl. Again, likely for the best.

I can’t say that was the last time I was in a church, though I am pretty sure it was the last time I went voluntarily for anything other than a wedding or a funeral. Within a few years, I stopped calling myself a Christian entirely, which was a harder transition than some might think. From what I’d seen, it was no longer who I was or who I wanted to be.

Some people might have been embarrassed by this episode. I know a few people reading it might be embarrassed for me. I am not. I value this experience. If nothing else, it taught me about indoctrination, insular communities, critical thinking, and to see the world as it is, not as I think it should be.

I see similar events played out again and again on social media right now, the same concepts, the same tactics, the same manipulation, if not always surrounding the same belief. The arguments unfold in the same way, uncritically. They rely on blanket acceptance of dogmatic axioms and postulates. Such beliefs are one small step away from prejudice. They are easily manipulated and weaponized by unscrupulous leaders who claim that you are either with us or against us. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s about religion or gun control or capitalism or civil rights, once people self-segregate and divide into isolated camps, once the dialogue is distilled down to memes or clever turns of phrases, coherence and understanding is lost. Everything is reduced to black or white.

Except this world is painted shades of grey. Most sin is simply shame in disguise.

That doesn’t mean I no longer have beliefs. I do. Most are nuanced and require some exploration to untangle. Some border on religious though I rarely discuss them. More are philosophical. A few just bring me comfort even if they only have an internal consistency to me. But I continually renew them or discard them based on my current understanding of the world, refusing to take them solely as articles of faith.

Everyone has beliefs, not all of which are religious. They are often irrational. Most are harmless. Some aren’t. The thing is, the vast majority of people are born into them. Most never have much reason to question them outside of a little adolescent rebellion which often only serves as a test.

That is not inherently bad. Beliefs serve an important psychological and sociological function. They are a shortcut to make the world understandable and relatable. They quantify the world into easily digested categories so we can make simple decisions without expending an inordinate amount of energy and move on. In that they are an evolutionary advantage. But like any inherited, instinctive trait, in modern society they can easily short-circuit and run amok.

On the other side, so can unbridled, undisciplined skepticism. When someone claims you have to verify everything for yourself rather than accept the findings of people with experience and expertise, they are sending you on a fool’s errand. They are trying to wear you down into apathy and exhaustion. It’s only meant to erode trust and damage societal institutions. In that, it has become little more than its own corrupt belief system, secular not religious, though many refuse to see it.

Thinking critically is more than just validating other people’s evidence (that’s called peer review, the operative word being “peer”). It’s about hearing what is and isn’t said. It’s about understanding rhetorical arguments and cognitive biases, our own not someone else’s. It’s more about self-reflection than cross-examination.

In his defense at his trial for heresy, Socrates said to his accusers, “An unexamined life is not worth living”. By which he meant any unexamined belief. Wise words. For which he was condemned to death.

In the end, people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the contradictions, regardless of the hypocrisy, regardless of the evidence right before their eyes. No one can change them. No one can force them to see the truth. Unless you seek, you shall not find.

In that, the last of my Congregationalist indoctrination springs to mind: God helps those who help themselves. And if we lose our ability to do even that in these troubling and contentious times, may s/he have mercy on our souls.

© 2020 Edward P. Morgan III