From the Nightmare to the Dream
A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

You may recall the story of the man who preached love and justice in the town square. At first he was such a curious sight that he drew a huge crowd. But when he continued day after day, the curiosity wore off, the crowds grew smaller. Occasionally he was heckled, sometimes a ripe tomato was thrown at him, yet he still continued. But soon no one paid him any attention at all. One day a child happened by and yelled, "Hey mister? Why are you wasting your breath? Can't you see that no one is listening?" The man replied, "At first I preached to change the world. When the crowd dwindled I thought maybe I might change one or two people. But now that no one listens, I still preach love and justice so that the world will not change me."

I thought of that story when Jack Mendelsohn suggested I march through Georgia with Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, from the office of Newt Gingrich in Marietta to the tomb of Martin Luther King in Atlanta - "from the nightmare to the dream." Of late, my hope for this nation has been in short supply and I needed to do something to keep my own spirits up. So I said "sure," and then Rich Daugherty decided to go and so did Victor Carpenter, the minister of our church in Belmont. The march was intended to protest the Gingrich-sponsored Contract on America and initiate a hundred days of progressive organizing.

And so two weeks ago today, Rich, Victor and I joined the march at a shopping mall in Smyrna, Georgia. There were, perhaps, 75 of us in all: a mixture of African-Americans, whites, latinos, native Americans, a Buddhist drummer, several union people, a man from the Sierra Club who goes to the Atlanta UU Church, another UU woman who attends the First Existentialist Church in Atlanta, a delegation from the gay and lesbian Human Rights Campaign. Al Sharpton was there - the controversial Brooklyn minister who ran for the Senate from New York State; and James Orange, another minister who was one of Martin Luther King's closest aides and his pallbearer, and of course, Jesse Jackson and his son Jesse Junior.

Victor and I carried a large banner with the poetic slogan, Boot Newt. Rich, smeared with sun-screen, wore his pith helmet with solar-powered fan - a sufficiently fetching sight that he was interviewed for the Atlanta TV news.

We set out, kept in line by a 30-year veteran of civil rights marches who led the chanting, "these old hills are mighty steep; put some blisters under your feet," then enough call-and-response that we were hoarse by the end of the day:

save our children/keep hope alive!

help our seniors/keep hope alive!

no more violence/keep hope alive!

affirmative action/keep hope alive!

boot that Newtie/keep hope alive!

Our first stop was the Chattahoochee River where the Sierra Club representative decried Congressional proposals to dismantle environmental and consumer protections. We continued to an IBM park where we talked about downsizing and the loss of jobs. From there we walked through an area called Buckhead - Jackson called it Bankershead - a marble canyon of wealth, more pretentious than any I've seen around here - tony stores and palatial Tara-like homes set way back behind lush lawns.

Passing motorists were split between those who honked their support and those who gestured obscenely or yelled, "Get a job" - but the gardeners and the hired help who gathered curiously on the curb were clearly on our side.

One of the pillared estates turned out to be the governor's mansion. We were joined by the president of the Progressive Baptist Convention and we gathered for prayer, remembering that whether it was the governor's mansion or a city-owned ghetto tenement, it was all public housing. We called upon the governor to remember the people who cooked his meals and washed his underwear.

The persistent theme of our march was to call attention to the widening gap between rich and poor in America, the widest gap between haves and have nots in the industrialized world. The top one percent in our country own 20% of the wealth; the top 20% own 80%. And yet the Gingrich budget priorities assume that the rich have too little, the poor have too much, corporations are taxed too much, and so we see reverse Robin Hood schemes.

Can you believe that Gingrich led the charge against closing a tax loophole for two dozen tax-evading billionaires who live off-shore and have denounced their American citizenship in order to avoid paying millions in U.S. taxes?

The Gingrich budget will cut the taxes for the most privileged Americans: 350 billion goes for a tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of our taxpayers (who make more than $230,000) - a $20,000 tax bonus for the rich each year!

There will be dramatic cuts in seniors' programs, student aid; 25 million children will lose school lunches; AmeriCorps will be scuttled; the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission will be replaced by boards dominated by the corporations that the FDA and the FCC now oversee; the only federal housing program will be a jail-building program (half of all public housing built in the last 10 years is already jail cells; 1.3 million Americans are in jail; 600,000 are black).

Education costs but ignorance costs more: it costs less to go to Harvard than to go to jail. But with the Contract on America, we'll have 2nd class schools and 1st class jails!

There is a lot of racism in all this. Welfare is stereotyped as a black issue when the vast majority of people on welfare are not black. Affirmative action is stereotyped as a black issue, when the primary beneficiaries are white women. It is a strategy that kills two birds with one stone: blacks are made the scapegoats but poor people everywhere are also victimized. Their real agenda is to reduce the life options of all but a few.

We ended the first day's march at Atlanta's Piedmont Hospital with more speeches and preaching about impending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, and we ended the day with gospel music and more preaching at a Baptist church in one of Atlanta's black neighborhoods.

Press coverage was disparaging. A cartoon in the Atlanta Constitution depicted us as an assemblage of special interests, led by Jackson singing "Onward Dependent Soldiers." Gingrich was also on the news - he countered our march by visiting a Habitat for Humanity construction site, in suit and tie, holding a hammer and hitting one nail. He said our march was a leftover publicity stunt from the 60's. He failed to mention that his Contract will remove 41 million dollars from the Atlanta public housing budget alone. He wanted to focus on one house for one poor family while cutting funds for a great many poor people.

Some had expected a thousand or more marchers, and so we heard a number of sermons about there having been but twelve disciples, about there having been four women at the front of the bus that day in Selma but, when asked to move, three did - leaving Rosa Parks sitting there alone. We heard a lot about keeping hope alive - no matter what!

The next day we marched from the hospital to a large Jewish temple that had been bombed three times by the KKK. There the rabbi, Jackson and Sharpton led a pognant worship service about strengthening the historic justice-seeking ties between blacks and Jews. We all sang "We Shall Overcome." Jesse is very careful about reaching out to the Jewish community these days. The march also stopped at the site where a Jewish businessman was lynched in 1915.

We proceeded to the steps of the Atlanta capitol building, and from there to a nearby housing project. If we numbered 75 going in to the projects, we numbered 300 going out! By then Rich and I were marshals, and my job was to invite little kids to come and shake Jesse's hand. But Jesse didn't need much help: he went knocking on people's doors; pushed baby carriages; hugged old people; talked to young men playing basketball. Eyes lit up. At times like that, 'keep hope alive' is more than a slogan - Jesse Jackson keeps hope alive for many of the poorest of the poor.

King's tomb is the other side of the projects, a high-crime area. There we gathered to once-again recommit to the dream. King's church, Ebenezer Baptist is also next door; and the march concluded there. It was a moving experience to sit in the church where Daddy King preached before Martin; where King's mother was shot dead by a crazy person while playing the organ; and to be reminded of so much of what's best in American history and so much of what's worst and still unfinished.

The march was a protest but also a clarion call to action. Jack and I having been meeting with Boston's black clergy, offering support for a mentoring project involving ministers and judges to reclaim 100,000 urban youth (100 churches, 20 youth in 50 cities; 100,000 youth), a voter registration effort in 50 congressional districts where extremists won with fewer votes than they won with in the last election (Jackson talks about high school seniors crossing the graduation stage with a diploma in one hand and a voter registration card in the other); and the continuing effort to build bridges between people and a true rainbow coalition.

The sermons, the music, the speeches, the marching - it was all inspiring. We learned a few new techniques for handling the offering - "I want those of you who can give $100 to stand right now" and keep on going to those of you who can give "anything at all." We spent a goodly time in prayer and I have photographs of Rich and Victor on their knees to prove it. And the preaching was fabulous; not just soul-stirring or amen-worthy but so good that the preachers and the congregation were high-fiving in the middle of it all. Ask me about the jars of oil in 2nd Kings, or the Jerusalem wall in Nehemiah; or the parable of the lost sheep as it applies to affirmative action. "There was more wool on the other sheep. There was more meat on the other sheep. There was a lot more money to be made on the other sheep. So did the shepherd let that solitary lost sheep go? Of course not!"

And there was the story of the farmer whose mule fell into the well. This was a faithful righteous mule who had worked hard and it naturally assumed that the farmer would pull him out. But after a few unsuccessful attempts, the farmer decided there was nothing to do but bury it. So he threw a shovelfull of dirt down the well and it landed on the mule's back.. The mule couldn't believe it; he got mad, so he shook off the dirt and stomped it down. But then the farmer threw another shovelfull of dirt down the well and, again, the mule shook it off and stomped it down. Again and again the farmer threw dirt down the well, and the mule kept shaking it off and stomping it down until, eventually, it was able to walk out of that hole all by itself!

As a nation, we're in a deep hole. Fascism with a smiling face, we must remember, can seem reasonable. When Victor preached about the march last Sunday in Belmont, he suggested that the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City may someday be compared to the fire which destroyed the Reichstag in Germany in 1932.

Wedges are being driven to divide people; the fires of hatred are fanned; "angry white men," state militias. We shouldn't forget that King's famous letter from a Birmingham jail was addressed to none other than the Christian Coalition of his era. We used to talk about eliminating poverty but instead of addressing its root causes the current approach is to make being poor a criminal act. Talk about contracts! What about the social contract that says all our fate is bound up together? As you do to the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you do unto me.

I am angry. I am also hopeful. Anger may just be a necessary part of keeping hope alive. But somehow our anger, our hope, our dreams must be mobilized, made to move. Shaking it off and stomping it down is the way out of the hole.

The day after I returned from Atlanta, Sue, Eric and I went to Chicago to visit my parents, and last Sunday we attended a Baptist church where we were the only whites in a congregation of a thousand or so. Who should be the preacher, unbeknownst to us? Jesse Jackson had come to fill in for their ailing pastor. He'd marched with us in Atlanta, afterward attended the annual policy conference of the Rainbow Coalition, gave the keynote address, and that morning flown to Chicago. In his sermon he reminded the congregation that "an inactive adjusting status quo gospel with an emasculated Jesus in not the gospel way. Saying the name of Jesus, praying to Jesus, talking about religion and not doing anything about it is not threatening to the status quo." Then and there, he proposed a march to the headquarters of the Chicago Housing Authority which had that morning been taken over by the Federal courts. He finished his sermon chanting "Forward, march! Forward, march!"

We may take issue with one or another issue or tactic; but our areas of agreement are far larger I suspect than any disagreement. Somehow we too must again mobilize our anger, our hopes, our dreams. "When you march, your brain works out too; when you march, you rise above fear; when you march, you educate the people; when you march, action creates reaction, when you march, you leave the past behind; when you march, you shake it off and stomp it down!"

Forward, march!

© Rev. John E. Gibbons, June 4, 1995
First Parish in Bedford
On the Common
75 The Great Road
Bedford, MA 01730
(781) 275-7994