Travel and Conversation

Brief Travel and some Conversations

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I was not looking forward to a short job related trip to Atlanta. I work in a warehouse. Sometimes we ship goods out of our warehouse. On occasion we are held responsible to prepare hazardous materials packaging. But honestly I had not shipped out a hazardous materials package in more than a year. I had been certified two years ago, and I may have sent one hazardous materials package in all that time. But we are certified in case the people who usually do the hazmat shipping aren’t there. It’s an important responsibility. They let you know when you are getting certified that failures to comply can endanger people’s lives, result in felonies that include fines and imprisonment, and fines can be drawn from your retirement plans. I was afraid that having not done much hazmat shipping in the past year or so I would have a hard time passing. I was on edge going to Atlanta.

            I was probably more on edge due to an internet conversation I had entered a day or two before going to Atlanta. It was a conversation in which I did not express myself well. It was about the rights of people to be served in contrast to whether or not and to what degree people had the right to say no to market demands based on conscience. I think of the issue as an issue intersecting the rights of conscience and the rights of consumers not to be discriminated against. The difficulty of lawmaking is not in discovering principles, but in resolving when and where one principle is more important than another. How we view the implementation of these principles has a lot to do with our age, background, the region of the country we come from, and we remain a long way from consensus on these issues. There are people having the privilege to say no to market demands. A physician who is opposed to abortion has the privilege of denying a customer wishing to have an abortion. A minister who does not believe in gay marriage is not at this time required to officiate such marriages. As a blogger no one has the right to require me to write something against my conscience, even if I were being paid for my writing. An artist sells the public on his need for inspiration and so generally speaking he remains privileged to do his work in accordance with his conscience. But if your art is decorating a cake then you are not privileged. You are not an elite profession. You are a serf. Your conscience has no place legally. That was my concern. How long can certain people be allowed freedom of conscience? Principles are almost never infinite. God is infinite. When anything else is made infinite it generally becomes an idol. It seems to me that good lawmaking takes all the issues into account and not just the issues our party or tribe supports. I was not trying to defend the right wing lawmaking attempts. I realize that legislating defensive acts of consciences often becomes a way to deny services to people based more in bigotry than conscience. I dream of progressives and conservatives and all the people whose rights or consciences get crushed to try to forge the best solution possible where freedom of conscience and freedom of the market principles collide. I don’t want a dictatorship of the right or the left by a simple majority. Maybe I am naïve to think we can do better. When the discussion was over I was left stewing about whether or not I should even have entered the conversation. I respected both people with whom I had the conversation. I wondered if I had clumsily made things worse and perhaps would have no more discussions with two people that I believed were intelligent, desirous of justice and mercy, and whose conversations on the internet I had enjoyed. I went to Atlanta with this conversation on my mind. It left me feeling gutted, foolish, and wounded, and perhaps mostly self-wounded. I don’t like to argue, not even about principles. I like to encourage, but sometimes it is important in our principles as Shakespeare said “to yourself be true.”

            I wasn’t ready to enjoy Atlanta like I would be on most journeys. Still, I knew an Atlanta icon when I saw one and took several photographs with my camera until I got this one which I kind of liked.

Does anything say Atlanta more than Coca-Cola?

 

            On Friday I passed the class. Our return flight was Saturday morning. I discovered the Mets were in town on Friday night. I’ve been a Mets’ fan since 1967 or so. I got on line and bought tickets to see the Mets and Braves in Turner Field. Fortunately there were still plenty of seats available, the Braves are rebuilding. When I got to the game I was close to the Mets’ dugout. How close?

I was this close. I had to watch for line drives, and was surrounded by Mets’ fans

 

I had a great view of third base:

Mets’ captain and third baseman David Wright

 

                With the test passed and the Mets winning helped by a Curtis Granderson grand slam home run and then a second home run by Granderson his next at bat and fair pitching from Matt Harvey, the Mets were on the way to winning the game and I was a bit happier with life. I rode the train, The Marta (Metro Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) back to where I was staying. I had a couple of interesting conversations on the way.

            The first was with a young man, in his twenties, who viewed himself as conservative and Republican but also believed in gay rights. We talked about things and I listened a lot. The South is more complex than most non-southerners give it credit. There is a conservative streak to a lot of southerners that runs alongside a sense of guilt about the racism of the past. It is important to listen to southerners because being conservative is not necessarily racist but sometimes it is. He informed me that how he thought about the gay issue was whatever you thought about it, this was the twenty-first century and it made no sense to oppose their rights. He was pleased that his governor had vetoed a restroom bill passed by the Georgia legislature. To be honest, I at least to some degree agree with him. In a few years this won’t be an issue. We will construct restrooms so that everybody has a private stall and we will do our business and wash our hands and get on with life. The reality is that transgendered people have been going to the bathrooms in America for years. They didn’t wait for our permission. I have written myself into some trouble at this point for stating the obvious. My Christian view of things does not equal my civil government view of things. As a Christian though I am learning that the first thing I owe to people around me is to help them to understand that Christ has come for each of us to deal with our struggles, with our difficulties, our sins, and with understanding us even where we do not understand us. That is for all of us. Whenever human beings of all sizes, shapes, dimensions, and genders are drawn to Christ it is when his love for each of us is revealed in its fullness and freeness. Athanasius did that by insisting that every aspect of our humanity was fully absorbed into union with Christ’s divinity so that on the cross our fullness of humanity was redeemed by Christ’s life, death, burial and resurrection. St. Francis of Assisi helped people realize that by helping people see the simplicity of the Gospel message proclaimed by Christ. Luther did this by letting people realize that it was not our works but God’s mercy and grace that enabled us to find ourselves in Christ. What many young people in our day realize is that the Christian message to gay men and women is that Christ has opened the door and we need to be careful not to close it before they encounter him. If in the 1980’s we as Christians had been the first to come with mercy and kindness in the Aids crisis rather than judgment and condemnation perhaps the whole relationship between Christendom and the homosexual community would be different. But for the most part we didn’t.

            A few minutes later I was invited by a black man, about 50 to sit down as there was an open seat next to him. He was much different from the young white man. The young white man was proud of the new south, of Atlanta, of the strides it was making. The black man was having a difficulty finding a job. He mentioned he was an out of work forklift driver and somehow his papers certifying his forklift license had gotten lost.  We talked about forklifts and connected in that. I have no doubt that it usually remains easier for a white man than a black man to find work. We can honestly say there have been improvements, but most managers and leaders in companies are white and there is a strong human tendency to feel a sense of comfort with people like ourselves. Whether we admit it or even know it, a lot of us have a sense that people of one race are more like us than those of another race. Quite a few of us still have to struggle to look past the color of one’s skin. This man spoke politely, and offered me the seat next to him, asked nothing from me, but you could see that life had worn him down. His Atlanta was not a place where strides were being made but where jobs were hard to find. As I left, we shook hands. I went to my hotel room. I had to get up early to fly out the next morning.

            When I got back from Atlanta one of the ladies that I had that gut wrenching conversation before going to Atlanta was sharing something she found difficult. She wants to write. She often finds her work distracting from what she would really like to be doing. I have felt the same thing. In recent weeks I have been struggling with lethargy and depression because in my chosen world I would be writing full time and working part time instead of the other way around. But that doesn’t seem like it will happen. I wish it could. So when I read what she was saying I felt an instant connection with all that she was saying and tried to encourage her. I thought of something I had seen and wanted to encourage her with its message. The message was simply: “Don’t give up on your day dream.”

            Some dreams get changed. Sometimes they fade away until we realize that they weren’t really meant for us. Sometimes we let people talk us out of them. But I think most of the time it’s important to pursue our dreams while dealing with life’s responsibilities. If we feel a dream passionately and don’t act upon it, I suspect that we will kill a piece of us living within us. Dreams change and transform as we live life. But I can still remember as a high school kid, being a mediocre student and then one day I was given the assignment to write an essay. I fell in love with the process of selecting words and making sentences more beautiful than they were when I first wrote them. It was like having my soul set free to do what it wanted to do. I didn’t think of the experience as a calling to write, but I found it strange how others would complain about essay assignments when I wished that was all I had to do. From that assignment throughout the days of my life, when I wanted to think I would write or take a walk, and when I was done walking I would write. If you feel like that about writing, then you have to write. Don’t quit your day dream. If you do a part of you will surely die before it’s time. Do everything in your power to make that writing beautiful, communicative, poignant, expressive, and inspiring. Find people who write well and ask them what they think and how you might improve. But be cautious and only trust them if you feel they are willing to encourage and wound you because they care about you.

            It was kind of neat trying to encourage the young lady. To be honest, hearing someone express this difficulty was itself an encouragement to me. I learned something. Less than a week before we hadn’t seen eye to eye. I wondered if I would be blocked and how many people would quit following me. But I learned that life is bigger than those points where we disagree. Maybe the connection was all the more important when this discussion took place after we disagreed. People aren’t disposable even if we disagree with one another. Today we might disagree about something we might disagree about for the rest of our lives. But tomorrow we might find something else in life, in which we know no other person who seems so connected to us at this point in time with this issue of life. Her words about what she was facing described my very situation. I knew some of the things I needed to do and now I could speak to myself while saying to her things I hoped would make sense to both of us. This dialogue helped me realize that humanity is not a disposable commodity. We live lives where one day we argue with a person who may the next day hold the key to help us understand something essential about ourselves. If one thing is important in what I am setting forth in this particular blog it is this - the people we encounter and sometimes argue with are not dispensable persons within humanity. They are not our enemies. Mostly we are in it together, living out lives we are trying to understand. It is pretty nice to know after you felt like crap for being stupid enough to talk about one of the hot issues, how a week later you found yourself sharing a part of life connected to shared inner dreams that are apparently important to both of you. It is a cliché isn't it that life is messy? I feel a lot better now. Life is funny isn’t it?