Untotaled: Stepping Six (May 8, 1965) … March 15, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

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When people control your food, water, hygiene, play and sleep, you learn to believe what they say–or spend a lot of time in your room without supper.

On May 8, 1965, I was thirteen years old and still a novice at any form of teenage rebellion. So when the church men decided to go to the mountains of Oklahoma for a meeting of all-male types–three thousand in attendance–to hear nothing but gospel preaching and gospel singing for a whole week, sitting on hard, knotty pine benches with a big knot just beneath my butt crack, I was compelled by those who controlled my supplies, to go.

It ended up being a week of firsts:

• It was the first time I ever went skinny dipping in an ice-cold mountain creek.
• It was the first time I heard that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a Communist and a womanizer.
• The first time I had s’mores made with miniature marshmallows.
• The first time I heard proclaimed aloud that Jews and Arabs were going to hell.
• The first time I got poison sumac on my bum (thus the origin of “bummer,” I would assume).
• And it was the first time I heard the word “nigger” used as a universal, collective pronoun, describing a group of people I didn’t understand and I suspect the speakers had little knowledge of, either.

The rally was forceful. It was intense. It was a meeting that peaked at times in jubilance. It was full of “god-talk.” It was permeated with self-righteousness.

And it was child abuse.

Because I needed …

Well, I needed tenderness. Instead, they gave me large doses of macho.

I needed an open mind. They worked very hard to seal mine shut.

God, I was desperate to know about girls. They proclaimed that women should “submit.”

Some laughter would have been nice. They reserved giggling for the older men around the campfire after they thought we young’uns were asleep.

And of course, I needed a world view. They provided God’s 40 acres.

After I got home and healed of my poison sumac, I started to think for myself. Yes, in my own simple way, I began to rebel.

I have never stopped.

I am still a warrior against anyone who has constructed a box for God … and wants the sheep to come passively, and worship.

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1946… March 13, 2014

Jonathots Daily Blog  

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Your mommy is pregnant.

Well, actually, because it’s 1946, one is not allowed to say “pregnant.” Preferable is with child, in the family way or on the nest.

You are about to be born. While you are still in your mother’s gentle jail, two atomic bombs are exploded, with tens of thousands of casualties.

You, too, are going to be part of a “boom”–yes, an explosion of births due to men returning from war, seeking the comfort of family and the pleasure of their wives’ company. By the time you are three years old, China has joined the Soviet Union, becoming Communist.

By age four, the world is back at war, in Korea.

When you are six years old, the Supreme Court makes a decision on Brown vs. Board of Education, decrying segregation in the South. It would take thirteen years of bloody confirmation.

When you’re eight years old, you suddenly are confronted with a Cold War, which threatens to heat up periodically, causing your local village to build a bomb shelter near the school.

In like manner, when you’re sixteen, you feel the anxiety of global annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

And then comes the roller coaster:

• At seventeen years of age John Kennedy is shot.
• At eighteen the Beatles arrive, disrupting the social consciousness of a society already reeling from the death of a President.
• At twenty-two, you stand by and watch as both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy are gunned down by no-name nothings.
• Also in the same year you watch the Vietnam war escalate as thousands of young men your age are dying in the jungle.
• At twenty-three they put a man on the moon.
• And when you’re twenty-four, National Guardsmen gun down four students at Kent State.
• On your twenty-eighth birthday, Richard Nixon resigns as President of the United States, acknowledging a conspiracy to defraud the American people.

The fear of your youth and the anger of your adolescence culminates into an adult cynicism.

Yes, the Baby Boomers became the adult Gloomers–and they passed onto their offspring a sense of mistrust, causing their children to constantly seek ways to escape reality.

It is rather doubtful if we can get out of the bland and bizarre depression that the country is experiencing without understanding how we got here.

We’re all too cynical.

We are too engrossed in ways to escape our lives instead of embracing them. And it is causing us to selfishly close up possibilities which just might make us better people.

Now you know how you got here.

Why don’t you go out today and do your best to reject the cynicism … and inhale some sort of new breath of life?

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Please contact Jonathan’s agent, Jackie Barnett, at (615) 481-1474, for information about scheduling SpiriTed in 2014.

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Kneiling… August 28, 2012

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I don’t know much about him.

I mean, I know his name–Neil Armstrong. I know that he walked on the moon. I’ve picked up bits and pieces about his history by listening to spurts of conversation over the past couple of days on the news blabber.

But honestly, I have chosen to remain ignorant about his specifics, and only consider his life as it pertains to me. Yes, I have granted myself a bit of indulgence. I don’t want to study the life of Neil Armstrong to discover patterns of behavior, reveal his denominational affiliation or find out if he’s conservative or if he’s liberal. I am fed up with that type of analysis. I am interested in what Neil Armstrong did and how it pertains to me.

He arrived on the scene in 1969 with his crew cut and space suit, climbed into a capsule which certainly promoted claustrophobia, and was exploded into outer space, to land on the moon.

It fascinates me that in that same time, the United States was fighting a war in Viet Nam while simultaneously opposing the same war, with young folks marching in the street. We were reeling, trying to recover from two recent assassinations in the previous year of Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. We had just elected a new President and were on the verge of fulfilling a promise by another President, who was also assassinated, who vowed to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Also in the midst of this pursuit of the moon, a bunch of hippies from New York were planning a rock concert, which ended up being one of the largest music festivals ever held. They called it Woodstock.

All of this was going on at the same time. (If we’d had a twenty-four hour news cycle, they actually would have had something to report on instead of trying to make hay out of all the straw polls.)

There was a sense that to do anything less than pursue radical excellence was to be  un-American. Even in my small town, our church started a coffee-house, which had grown to 125 kids showing up on Saturday night, in a town of only 1400. When some of the parents objected to the fact that the coffee-house was held in a church and they didn’t want their children pummeled with religion, our board just went down the street and rented a small house where the young folks could have their gathering. Nobody argued about it; nobody called it religious persecution. We just adapted.

In the midst of this confusion and activity, Neil Armstrong, from Wapakoneta, Ohio, took a trip to the moon. He walked around, said his famous line–“one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”–and returned, received a couple of medals, waved from a car in some parades and went back to being Neil. He didn’t host a new reality show. He didn’t start a business off of the fame of being the “Moon Walker.”  He didn’t appear incessantly on television news programs as an authority on every subject thought to be even partially peripheral to his expertise. He didn’t demand anything.

He walked on the moon and then he came back and lived on the earth.

It is a style I would like to study–a better way of “kneeling.” Some people take their posture of prayer and rise to condemn the world around them. But Mr. Armstrong did his “Neiling” and returned to be just one of us.

Here are three things I have learned about “Neiling:”

1. Do something well until somebody notices. Then you might get a chance to do it even better.

2. When you get that chance, do your best walking, your best work and leave behind an example of magnificence.

3. Don’t make a big deal about it, but instead, blend in with your fellow-human beings, thus confirming that the same potential exists in all of us.

It is ironic that the death of this great astronaut is simultaneously commemorated with the termination of manned flights into outer space. They say he was very upset about that. I would imagine so. Someone who prospered and excelled in a season of war, protest, rock and roll and dancing on the moon might find our times and attitudes a bit anemic.

This I know–an eighty-two-year-old man passed away who quietly lived his life with one major exception: for a brief season, to each and every one of us, he confirmed that there was a man in the moon.

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Stepping Back … June 13, 2012

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In the pursuit of life, what is often lost is the passion which causes the pursuit to be worth the energy in the first place.

Somewhere along the line, we human beings started believing that establishing a routine was a symbol of maturity and therefore a confirmation of our legal status as adults. If it just ended up in a boondoggle of boredom, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. But the difficulty with folks who find themselves trapped on a treadmill is that anybody who comes running by with a more enlightened approach is deemed to be odd, and eventually is either attacked or ostracized. Yes, we are all tempted to reject anyone who doesn’t fall into the common death-march of “the same-ole’ same-ole.”

That is why, every once in a while, we must step back and look carefully at our history as a country, so as we try to go forward, we honor the important things that cause us to rise above our own mediocrity. When you take the time to do this, you come up with a very simple, but certainly consistent, result.

Perhaps the greatest man of the eighteenth century was Thomas Jefferson. You can certainly nominate other individuals for such a distinction, but Jefferson blended the ideas and needs of thirteen colonies, congealing them into a document that could be signed as a symbol of all of their “declarations of independence.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident–that all men are created equal.”

In that one statement, he crystallized the freedom and liberty that everyone craved, whether they actually remained faithful to the purity of the concept or not.

Moving along into the nineteenth century, you arrive at the life and times of Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln, Republican candidate for the presidency, 1860 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Although to many people he was gaunt, gangly and certainly not Presidential material, he had the intelligence to retain the integrity of that original piece of wisdom from the Declaration. In Gettysburg, at a memorial service, he spoke and said, “A new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Say what you will about the Civil War, and cite cases of heritage, states’ rights and loyalty, but here is an undeniable truth: if Abraham Lincoln’s side had NOT won the war, slavery would have remained and therefore, all men would NOT be equal.

Journeying into the twentieth century, you discover a whirlwind of activity and invention, but still, you discover the soul of Jefferson’s contention summed up in the speech portrayed as a dream by a man struggling for freedom, who pined, with great hope, that someday his four children “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and, yes–Martin Luther King, Jr. –three men separated by nearly two hundred years, but the same message.

We are now twelve years into the twenty-first century and there are many wildernesses in the voices. There are many opinions. There are countless ideas on how to progress us forward to new prospects of prosperity. What we seem to be absent are the voices of Jefferson, Lincoln and King. What is completely devoid from our consciousness is the notion that “all men are created equal.”

And unfortunately, when that perspective is not thrust to the forefront, what replaces it are excuses about why “we are all so different.” Unity, peace, joy and liberty have never been established by people gathering in a room to acknowledge their diversity. We may feel like we are being extremely open-minded by tolerating other lifestyles and cultures, but unless we are willing to speak aloud that “all men are created equal,” we privately will contend in our hearts some form of personal superiority.

I know there are those who would insist that even though they don’t go around sharing that particular sentiment of equality all the time, it is still at the root of their philosophy. I would have to disagree. The minute you allow yourself to be surrounded by political parties or spiritual prophets who are not daily reminding each and every one of us of equality and liberty, the natural tendency of our species is to manufacture and promote some devious form of prejudice.

“All men are created equal” is the only breath mint which removes the foul odor of bigotry. If it doesn’t ring in our ears every single day, we begin to look for ways to escape from it or admit our weakness in being unable to achieve it. It is not a goal; it is not an aspiration. It is not a platitude. It is what prevents us from being cantankerous, selfish and overly focused on our own personal families instead of putting the spotlight on the greater family of man.

As I stepped back last year and looked at the history of our country, this realization overwhelmed me. With whom do I wish to side? Where do I want my portion of personal consecration to land in the spectrum of our present history? This is why I’ve been traveling the country with the message: “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

Honestly, when I share this in front of an audience, the initial response is passive. Let’s be completely candid–we have all had secret training which has informed us that there ARE people who are better than other people. Matter of fact, there are those who mock my simple little statement of “NoOne is better than anyone else,” as being hopelessly naive, if not innocently idiotic.

But we do not move forward by trouncing on the rights and dignity of others. And even if the ideals we speak are not presently feasible, they still need to be touted as the oracles of God they were intended to be.

• Without Thomas Jefferson, we do not have the foundation for individual liberty which makes this country great.
• If you take away the heart and soul of Abraham Lincoln, you are left with a fragmented country, where the value of each human life would vary, based upon provincial choices.
• And when you snatch the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., from our history, you end up with a people who are freed from slavery, on paper, to be held in bondage in the marketplace.

It is time for us to step back. Otherwise, we may go through an entire one hundred years without sharing the greatest message of unity: all men are created equal. In other words, “NoOne is better than anyone else.”

I know that everybody has a life; I know weddings are important and funerals need to be memorialized. But at the forefront of our push towards excellence has to be a reverence and also an application of the equality of all. Without this, we begin to listen to the loudest voices which spout the most statistics, working off the greatest funding.

This will make us barbarians.

This will make us independent of Jefferson, freed from Lincoln … and unable to crown a King.

   

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King for a Day… January 16, 2012

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet.

Without understanding this simple fact, nothing of any true significance can be gained by discussing his life, studying his path or commemorating his day. As a prophet, he had the purpose of discovering the ants infesting our picnic and dispelling the sand from the gears of the machine of progress. Because of that, I know one thing for certain–neither liberals or conservatives would be happy with him today.

The liberals try to wrap him up in a big bow for their causes, saying that he was a voice against conservative bigotry in this country. The conservatives cautiously mention him in reference to his stands against government establishments.

I will not lead you to believe that I am an expert on the life and times of Dr. King. I know more than some and less than many. But from that limited perspective, allow me to get the dialogue started on a worthwhile subject. What would Dr. King–Martin, if you will–do if he woke up in America today?

He would never have approved the bail-out of Wall Street, AIG and the banks. Even if it were a President of his particular liking, he would have stood against the greed that caused the need that ended up planting the seed of economic disaster. How do I know this? Because what took him to Memphis, where he was cruelly assassinated, was standing with the local garbage collectors against the systems that tried to keep them from a decent wage. The liberals would be very disappointed with Martin because he would not authorize a heavy-handed government solution to a systemic problem–poor usage of funds and lack of economic awareness and principle.

Likewise, Martin would certainly speak out against the conservatives and their belief that they can socially engineer our country into some sort of manufactured righteousness, cleaning the outside of the cup but leaving the inside filthy. He would not tolerate a state in the Union still flying the Confederate flag under some ridiculous assertion of honoring heritage. The conservatives would be greatly upset with his desire to see freedom for all, even if that liberty meant that we must occasionally tolerate other people’s practices which we find distasteful or even sinful.

Martin would upset many people because he was humorous. He was  a practical joker. He didn’t take everything in his life too seriously, but instead made time for fun. His friends remember that the last thing they did with their leader was have a pillow fight in the motel room. Matter of fact, when he was struck down by the bullet, they failed to run to his side because they thought he was kidding around. Both Republicans and Democrats are an overly somber group of grumpers, who feel that maturity is best expressed by furrow-browed discussions of great intensity.

The Hollywood community would be greatly astounded that Martin would not be applauding their efforts. Dr. King believed that the message should affect culture–not that our culture should determine how we pander out our message. He would not applaud the rap and hip-hop community for creating a new level of social ignorance and mistreatment of women, glorifying violence under the guise of presenting realism. He would tell them clearly: there are different ways to keep from advancing as a people. You can be held back by another race–or you can hold yourselves back by locking into the provided stereotype.

I think Republicans AND Democrats would be greatly distressed by his unwillingness to support our penchant for war. Matter of fact, there are those who believe he was assassinated NOT because of his stance on civil rights, but rather, because he had begun to speak out against the war in Viet Nam.

He would also stand against a religious system still using an alleged worship hour for segregation, claiming that the spiritual experiences are “unique” and therefore can remain separate.

He would be distressful to our society because he would not be pleased with what he saw, and as a prophet, he would speak out freely against excess and lack. And the interesting thing is, he probably, if he lived in our time, would not be assassinated–at least not with a bullet. Instead, his sexual trysts, pranks and probably even his finances would come under severe scrutiny, be exposed in our 24-hour news cycle, and within a very short period of time, he would be retired to the hall of disgrace.

That’s the way we handle our prophets today. We find their foibles, which are really what make them human enough to BE voices crying in the wilderness, and we focus on those missteps, advertise them and discuss them off-handedly until everyone agrees that the person we are attacking is so devoid of character that we shouldn’t listen to a thing that he or she has to say.

Dr. King would not make the liberals happy. He was too independemt, asking people to rise up for themselves rather than taking government hand-outs, requiring people to take responsibility for their lives.

Martin would certainly frustrate the conservatives because he would demand that from our position of self-discovery, we allow others a chance to have the same right and privilege, and that we not try to go further, leaving the less fortunate in the background.

Martin would certainly anger the entertainment industry because he would challenge the superficial nature of their art and ask them if there was any soul left in their proposed genius.

King for a Day–it would require that you be a prophet who speaks out about the weaknesses of a society that is aware of its futility, but insists that change is unnecessary and instead, selects a jaded profile of dejection.

I like this holiday. It reminds me that we still require prophets. It lets me know that there is still a message that needs to be shared that is neither conservative or liberal, religious or secular, but rather, human. When we cease to believe that the message from God is really delivered in the language of our own species, we no longer have His blessing.

Dr. King–if he were here today, he would probably read this essay and say, “You got some of it right, kid, but you missed me on several points.”

For after all, he’s a prophet. It isn’t his job to be agreeable, just to get us all to move towards greater agreement.

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Jonathan wrote the gospel/blues anthem, Spent This Time, in 1985, in Guaymas, Mexico. Take a listen:

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