While cruisin’ the deep and wide river in Nashville a week and so back I dropped in on a workshop called “Understanding White Privilege” ’cause not only am I white but I’m also male and heterosexual making me thrice privileged.  This kind of thing is always a good reminder of how bad my life could really be if I wasn’t who I am, as miserable as it frequently is being whom I am notwithstanding.  Besides, my travlin’ pal brother-in-law is Art the Mexican.  My sister tells me their stories about L.A. cops and Latinos.  Their Latino-hued son made the mistake of running when rousted for drinking a beer on the street corner—got the shit kicked out of him in the “takedown” and ended in the hospital.  Being a 21-year-old dumbass doesn’t know cultural boundaries; but the reaction to it does.  Back in their dumbass days my white sons also ran from the cops in the wee hours of darkness and when caught were brought to the house by the sheriff.  (That’s when I introduced the public use of the ‘f word’ to the family, i.e., ‘Are you out of your fucking minds?’)  The sheriff brought my boys home; Art the Mexican had to find his at the hospital.

The presenter was a (white) filmmaker who does documentaries on such stuff.  She was going to show clips to lead the presentation but, as per usual here in the Church Militant, the buzz machines didn’t work and they had to send for a techno-wizard.  It was during this delay that she lost all control of the workshop as our multi-hued, multi-cultural mostly clergy participants launched into our own chaotic agenda of story-telling and soul-searching.  Live human interaction also works when the tv breaks down, though I do grow weary of the breast-beatin’ mea culpateers hang-doggin’ it or defensive in their white guilt.  Seems to me better just to acknowledge it:  in this society at this time white is the privileged color.  The question isn’t if it is so, the question is how do you create a community where all colors and cultures can experience the same respect, and dignity, and decency which my white privilege affords me.  It’s cool that the church does this, has this conversation and encounter—in, no less, the name of Jesus.  It’s good to hear from the folks on the outside of the white bubble, seeing things from a different perspective.

Molly the filmmaker did mange to grab control of things toward the end by leading us on the contemplative question, ‘Can you remember a time you learned compassion from somebody?’  There is the meditative pause among us, and then the white guy feels compelled to share in the sober tone that suggests he’s just had a divine revelation and four sentences in I realize oh no! it’s the dreaded Death Bed Tale, the most corrupt non sequiter one could introduce after an hour of discussion about white privilege, ala ‘I remember the compassion of the dying guy to who’s side I rushed in the middle of a snowy night’.  Dude.  Death Bed Tales are never about the dead guy, they’re always about you.  Just to drive that point home, the old white gal grabs the floor and goes into a reverie of not one but two Death Bed Tales in one of those whispering voices that show zero consideration for anybody trying to hear her; it’s enough, I guess, that she hears herself.  But, Jesus, lady, don’t do it on my time.  It’s not a revelation from God, and you’re boring anyway.  No wonder two of ‘em died while you were there.

‘Course I couldn’t say that, and was given instead to the recollection of Ho the Shit-Burner back in Vietnam.  That’s at least (and of course) what we called him, anyway, Ho.  He was a little old skinny dirty man in filthy and ragged clothes with occasional and yellow rotten teeth.  Our latrine was a wooden multi-seater in which we sat and shat into sawed off 55-gallon drums.  Ho gathered these drums of shit every day and set them on fire with diesel fuel.  We tended to keep our distance, or at least stand upwind when talking to Ho the Shit-Burner, though he understood no English and simply nodded and smiled ‘yessa massa’-like.

We ate in a wooden mess hall, but had to carry our trays and dishes outside to wash ourselves in the ol’ army 4- or 5- or something pot method, the first, of course, being the slop bucket into which went our left over food and filth from this meal which, today, also included minestrone soup.  The thing looked like a bucket of vomit when I saw Ho approach from the other side and stick his hand into that stuff and dig around up to his elbow until he pulled out an only lightly chewed apple, wiped and shined it on his filthy shirt, showed it to me, and walked off with the smile of someone who’d just found the priceless pearl.

So I think of learning compassion while Me!-Me! drones on with her Death Bed Tale and up jumps Ho the Shit Burner and I’m pretty sure that it has something to do with the fact that he burns shit and fishes in slop buckets for food and delights in finding a partly-chewed apple.  It was his utter vulnerability that taught the compassion ’cause you end up grieving for the misery in which he lives.  They told me that Ho the Shit Burner was my enemy.

I think he was holy.

Larry