20. Million. Can you even begin to wrap your mind around that? When I first read these words on International Justice Mission’s Website, I couldn’t grasp the numbers.

To be honest, I live in Letter Land, that happy place where writers live in oblivion to things like numbers. Slapping a number in front of the word million doesn’t phase me.

20 million what? Dollars? Writers never make that much, so that’s out. Words? That’s a Dostoevsky novel. Perhaps too many words.

20 million people? What does that even look like, that mass of humanity, nameless and faceless?

To make up for my numerical deficiency, I have taken to creating word pictures to make more sense of numbers beyond the reach of my imagination. It’s a journalist’s trick my former editor taught me. We are in the age where information often gets thrown at us with little or no explanation, so we have to grapple with the meaning of the numbers.

So, 20 million. Let’s put that into a frame we can understand:

First, Fly to New York City. Check out the Empire State Building. Cruise Broadway. Then enslave the entire city — everyone from Mayor Bloomberg and the Rockettes, down to the last struggling mother in Harlem.

Don’t stop there. Next, travel to Los Angeles, and make slaves of the entire population of metro LA, celebrities included. If you’ve ever driven through LA County traffic during rush hour, you can imagine what a difficult job it would be.

But that only puts you at 12 million. To get to 20 million people, you need to conquer Chicago, Houston and Phoenix as well.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot – these numbers are from 1999. The numbers have now leaped to an estimated 27 million. And numbers from closed countries are hardly accurate. So you can easily throw in Philadelphia, San Antonio, Dallas, San Diego, San Jose, Detroit and San Francisco into the mix as well.

I am not an alarmist. I tend to walk pretty calmly through life. I’m not easily rattled, even when others around me are whipped into a frenzy, squawking about global warming. Or food chemicals. Or the inherent evil of (insert cause here.)

But when I started looking at these slavery numbers and figuring out what they might look like in real life, I was ready to throw a full-on, loud-mouthed, squawking activist fit.

Once I calmed down a bit, I started asking questions. Who are these people? What does slavery look like?

Take a look at the tag on your shirt. Look at your shoes. Many of the items we wear, particularly cheaply made clothes, are made in factories where people are bought as slaves and forced to work long hours in horrible conditions.

You know that sketchy massage parlor in town, the one people talk about as being “that kind of place?” Women are often trafficked in from other countries and forced to work as prostitutes.

In some foreign countries, slave laborers make bricks and toil in the hot sun next to their master’s palatial homes. Sound familiar from history class?

According to Paul E. Lovejoy, in his book Transformations in Slavery, from 1650 when the slave trade began, until it ended in 1900, 10.2 million people were transported. While slavery is tragic no matter what era, double that number were reported in one year just 10 years ago, and it is on its way to treble that.

In various countries, from North America to Asia, in small pockets of tens and hundreds and thousands, there are 27 million people with no option where they work, where they live, how they move about.

It’s enough to make a journalist squawk. So let’s do something about it.

Sure, you say. It’s easy for me, sitting behind my computer, making weird noises, to talk about doing something to impact a global pandemic. It’s overwhelming.

I know. Even I am sometimes overwhelmed with the facts, but if we are all concerned, and we move in one thing to stop slavery, imagine the difference it could make.

We all have a voice, which might seem insignificant. But add it to another voice, and another, and the sound grows to a roar.

What will you do with your one voice?

My challenge is this: Educate yourself. Visit International Justice Mission, Not For Sale and Because Justice Matters. Read about slavery, and be informed. Let the information soak into your soul, let the numbers go past your head and into your heart. See where it leads you. It just might change the world.

And that’s something to squawk about.

Lauren Nelson is the editor and chief troublemaker for Hope Ink Magazine. She is currently fascinated with 19th century English fiction, tea, and print making. You can e-mail her at hopeinkmagazine@gmail.com.

“Last Friday, IJM’s Chennai team rescued 13 children, women and men from slavery in a large rice mill. Forced to live in tiny shacks within the compound, the slaves were desperate for release. One of the victims, Mukesh*, was suffering from tuberculosis and had been forbidden from leaving the mill for treatment. At rescue, he had not eaten for four days.

Today, he and the rest of the slaves are free. Mukesh is receiving medical treatment, and he and the other former slaves will receive funds and supplies from the government to build their new lives. IJM aftercare staff will provide them with continued assistance as they resettle in their home villages.”

International Justice Mission works in countries where there is a functioning legal system that allows them to prosecute people who are trafficking in human lives, along with other injustices. The process is a slow one, but when criminals are punished for breaking laws, others are more likely to think twice before committing the same act. Over time, an entire culture can be changed.

This is the hope we are talking about with Hope Ink. Hope for people in slavery. Hope for the downtrodden and those living in extreme poverty. It’s a gut-wrenching, one-person-at-a-time operation to begin with, but like a snowball, if we can get things rolling, the impact gets larger with each turn.

You might not be a lawyer, but you can help rescue people condemned to a life of slavery. See how you can get involved by visiting IJM’s Website.

I had no idea how long I would be there, so I just trusted God from day to day. I had no idea what Haiti would be like, but I knew God called me there, so I was going to be obedient and just trust him. The first week I was there, I had a divine appointment with a local Haitian named Wesner. He wanted to show me around town and take me to the local market, so I went with him.

As it turned out, he knew everyone. His friendship opened a door for me to minister to everyone in the town. I started playing basketball on a local team with Wesner, and every single day I went to practice, God brought people to me to talk about my faith in Christ. I got to share with lost people and other local Christians in Montrouis about having a relationship with Jesus and how God looks at our hearts.

It was a God thing for sure, and I know the Holy Spirit was just giving me words to say to each person that I talked with. After basketball practice we would go and hang out in downtown Montrouis, and Wesner would introduce me to people. I got to share the love, grace, and forgiveness of Christ with them. I built real relationships — hanging out with them, laughing, dancing  — whatever I could do to tell them about Jesus. It was definitely out of my comfort zone, but I knew I had to be obedient to what God was telling me to do.

I lived about 40 miles from Port-au-Prince. We were shaken, but not stirred by the earthquake. I was actually playing basketball up the street with some locals when it happened, and it was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. By God’s grace, no one here was hurt. We had no cell service, though, so we couldn’t call to let everyone know we were okay. There was extensive damage in Port-au-Prince and other areas.

In Port-au-Prince, and other areas, the destruction was massive. Buildings collapsed and killed many, and many more were missing. Some people that work on our campus in Montrouis lived in Port-au-Prince in the area that was hit the hardest. Without cell phone communication after the earthquake, they were not able to get through to their families and only could listen to local radio talk about the thousands of homes that had collapsed. We spent the night in prayer and prepared to take them to search for their families first thing the morning after.

As we made our way to Port-au-Prince, it was clear that we were in for a tough day. We were able to pick our way through streets strewn with debris and power lines. Every hospital had closed gates and thousands of wounded and dying lay on the sidewalk outside. We stopped at one hospital to search for our friend’s wife and while we were there, we started treating people with non-life threatening wounds.

Digging chunks of cement out of gaping wounds, cleaning head wounds — the work was gruesome. One of our friends, Dr. Kerry Reeves, had a mother beg him to go and check on her little girl. When he got there, she was completely covered with a sheet. Upon pulling back the sheet, he was pretty sure she was dead — covered in flies with a gaping head wound and disfigured face. Kerry was able to find a weak pulse and get her to respond. He got the girl some water and tried to see if there was anything he could do. Unfortunately, he was only tell the family how to care for her as she waited to see if the hospital would open. Kerry prayed for her and her family and left broken-hearted.

We picked up a 12-year-old boy whose parents and friends some were carrying him down the road using a door as a stretcher. They needed a ride to the hospital. While in the back of the truck, we tried to help him but he had a major head injury and a crushed shoulder. I wept over the little guy, so broken that we couldn’t help him. I felt so burdened that we had to talk to him about his faith before he died. We got down on our knees as he looked at us through swollen eyes. He gave a testimony of loving Jesus and believing that God was waiting for him if he was to die. We prayed and wept with him. We dropped him off at the hospital and left not knowing his fate.

On the way back home, all I could do is cry. Seeing all of those dead bodies tore me up inside. All I could think was, ‘I hope they know Jesus.’ When we got home, I praised God for everything – for saving me from the earthquake, for the people we were able to help even a little. I fell asleep for about 20 minutes and got woken up by another aftershock.

We could not count the dead bodies in the streets and on the sidewalks in Port-au-Prince. Everyone was afraid to go back into the buildings, so they built sheet tents in the streets and all over parks. Many of them are still living in these conditions. One of our good friends that barely escaped before his house fell spent the night standing in a parking lot with over 2,000 other people, praying God would let them see one more day.

After the earthquake, we were doing a lot of going back and forth into Port-au-Prince with different groups from the Montrouis area, distributing food, water, clothing and toys. It was great working with everyone, being used by God, sharing his love and being the hands and feet of Jesus. We were so busy, working long days. It was so hard going back and forth, still seeing all of the people living in tents.

Haiti is in a desperate place as a nation. While aid groups provide physical help, the people of Haiti needs God’s help. They will not ever recover solely from humanistic aid. They need the transforming power that God brings. We need intercessors to come and prophetically declare God’s truth over the nation, to come and usher in His presence into the refugee tents and the rubble-covered streets.

The Red Cross is not full of the Holy Spirit. Haiti’s Civil Protection is not full of the Holy Spirit. The UN is not full of the Holy Spirit. They bring help, but not the Kingdom. Haiti will be changed as people begin welcoming in the One who can make beauty from ashes.

Philip Causey was a Discipleship Training School student at YWAM Pismo Beach in 2009. He served for several months in Haiti before and after the earthquake, and will be joining staff with YWAM Pismo in May 2010.

Interested in going to Haiti? Project Sixty One, a ministry of YWAM Pismo Beach in Central Coast, is leading teams overseas to bring aid. For more information, visit their Website. You can also follow them as a friend on Facebook and Twitter.

Cover photo courtesy of Billy Scanlan.

Dominic Laing: As far as this trip to Cambodia, how did you come to this team and this time and this place?

Holland Prior: It was a very bizarre series of events that I can only describe as, ‘This is what God had for me at this very time.’ I’ve, over the last couple of years, been getting more and more educated on human trafficking, and getting more involved in what my particular denomination, the Wesleyan Church, is doing to combat human trafficking. Back in September I went to a conference at our headquarters, human trafficking and what we as a community can do, you know, like raising awareness, education and buying products not produced by slave labor and all that kind of stuff.

So, went to that conference, met some great people. That was in September. So a couple of months later I got this mass email, I think that was sent to everyone who attended the conference, like ‘Hey, we’re taking a trip [to Cambodia] in May.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, sweet, that’d be interesting. I’ll think about that after Christmas, when I have more time.’

I thought ‘That would be fascinating,’ because WorldHope, the organization I’m traveling with, who’s affiliated with the Wesleyan Church, has been in Cambodia for a long time. They run an assessment center where they do after-care and recovery for girls pulled out of brothels. So they work closely in conjunction with International Justice Mission and other organizations that raid brothels, pulls girls out, and they give the girls to WorldHope, essentially, and WorldHope does the after-care.

Then about a week before Christmas I got an email, specifically to me, that said, ‘Hey Holland, we’ve got a last minute opening on our February team. Are you interested? And I went, ‘Well, now that’s interesting.’

Finally I connect with [the trip coordinator], and she answers my questions, and she goes, ‘By the way, if you want to go on this trip, we need your stuff, like, yesterday, because we have to purchase airfare at least six weeks out and it’s six weeks out right now.’

So, I was, I remember distinctly, I was sitting in front of my computer and just went, (claps hands) ‘Okay.’ I turned around and I asked my boss, ‘How would you feel about me taking a couple of weeks off in the middle of the school year?’

Then I went right into the process of collecting all my application materials, because WorldHope requires that you submit a few references, and get all your proof that you have all your travel documents and everything. I basically drove straight to my pastor’s house and was like, ‘Here’s a reference, fill it out while I’m watching, because I have to go fax all this in right now.’

It was pretty crazy. I was able to track down everything that I needed that day, fax it all in. I had this conversation with the lady on Friday. By Wednesday, I had a plane ticket for Cambodia.

D: Wow. Incredible.

H: I’m still…I walked around for a couple of weeks – ‘I’m going to Cambodia. What just happened?’

D: How long are you going to be in Cambodia?

H: I will be there about ten days.

D: And it’s you and who else on the trip?

H: It is me and five other women, so there’s six of us total. I don’t know any of them. They are all out of a church in Buffalo, N.Y. Their church decided to put together this team to send a team over to Cambodia to work in the center. And the reason I got called in was, I guess, initially there was, I think four, there must’ve been four, that were gonna go, and then another woman signed up. WorldHope prefers to travel in even numbers, and they didn’t find anyone else at the church who wanted to go, so WorldHope — I still don’t know to this day who at WorldHope gave them my name — but WorldHope contacted me right away and said, ‘Do you want to go?’

D: So you’re working in the center?

H: Yes. They call it the assessment center, the girls are there for, I believe, up to 60 days. They’re between the ages of 4 and 14.

D: That young?

H: Yeah.

D: Serious?

H: Dead serious.

D: I would’ve thought they were like, 12 to 18.

H: Yeah. The girls are between the ages of 4 and 14 at the center, and I believe they can house up to 50 girls, and they’re usually full. During [their time there] they call it the assessment center because they kind of assess, ‘What’s the situation?’ Does the girl have a family to go back to? If she goes back to the family, are they going to sell her again?

And then they try to decide is the girl’s family safe? Is the family the reason she was in the brothel in the first place? Did they sell her? Was she kidnapped? Or somehow, was the family tricked? You know, like, ‘Hey, I’ll take her into the city so she can go to school and whatnot.’

D: And then she disappears.

H: (nods) So they assess what to do next. Does she go back to her family? Does she go into a long-term facility where she’s given some education and taught how to make a life for herself?

D: Does the assessment center offer any medical assistance, if necessary?

H: I believe so. I don’t know as many details as I think all the women from Buffalo, because I came on so late.

D: The girls that are in the assessment center, are they mainly coming from brothels? Or is it a combination of slave labor and sex trafficking?

H: It is my understanding that this specific center is sex trafficking. So the girls are coming from brothels.

D: And ages 4 to 14?

H: (nods) Ages 4 to 14. Which breaks my heart. Absolutely. I was, like you said, expecting 12 to 18 [year olds,] but when she said, ‘Oh no, all the girls are between 4 and 14,’ I almost cried right then. Four years old?

D: In your opinion, are people in Cambodia aware of what’s happening, and are people in the United States, or in your community, aware of what’s happening?

H: I can’t really speak for Cambodia. I haven’t been there before and this will be my first time. I don’t really know what the climate is. My general impression is people know what’s going on. Because you kind of know if a girl disappears, I mean you pretty much know what happened.

D: And as far as American awareness?

H: I think Americans are woefully uninformed, unaware, blissfully ignorant, whatever you want to call it.

D: What misconceptions do you think people may have about human trafficking? Like, my thought that the girls’ ages were between 12 to 18, when in fact they were much younger.

H: I think the biggest misconception is that these girls are somehow at fault. Like, ‘Well it’s their fault. Maybe they got into debt or whatever, and they chose to be a prostitute.’ Or, ‘Well, being a prostitute’s the lifestyle they chose.’ They never chose this. I’m not saying there not prostitutes in the world who have chosen it. But girls living in brothels, who are victims, there’s no way they’ve chosen this.

The second misconception is that they stay there by choice because they’re not shackled in any way. So it’s, ‘Well, why don’t they just escape? Why don’t they go get help? Why don’t they try to make their lives better and get out of there?’ The answer is — they can’t. Because we don’t, most people don’t understand what fear can do to a person. I mean, if you’re 4 years old, and I steal you from your family — I tell your family some story about, ‘Oh, I’m gonna give you an education or whatever, and take you into the city with me…’

Once we get there, I sell you into a brothel, and then say ‘If you ever try to escape, you’re going to be arrested because you’re now a criminal. You’ll go to jail. Your parents will go to jail because they willingly let you come and do this. If you try and go back to your parents, they’re going to hate you because of what you now are.’ I mean, you are completely imprisoned. It’s just not in a physical sense. So I think that’s another big misconception that there’s something they can do about it.

And I think the third one is that there’s nothing we can do. I hear that a lot. ‘But, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ False. No, not everyone is going to go raid brothels with International Justice Mission. Not everyone is going to be traveling overseas and doing that. But newsflash: Human trafficking is in America, too. It’s no excuse to not educate yourself; to educate yourself, educate your community.

There’s a fabulous group down in Orange County out of Vanguard University. They go around to the free clinics, where they speak languages other than English a lot of the time. A pimp will hardly ever take one of his girls to a hospital if she gets sick, because the authorities might become involved. But they will take them to these free clinics where they’ll probably never see the same doctor twice, they don’t all speak English, so it’s not a huge risk. This group will go into those kind of clinics and train the staff to recognize signs of human trafficking, so they know what to look for.

D: Do you know the name of the group?

H: Sandy Morgan leads it. She’s the administrator of the Orange County Task Force for Human Trafficking. And she is also, I think, the director of women’s studies at Vanguard University. She coordinates a lot through the university and has her students go out and do a lot of this stuff.

D: Before talking to you, one of my misconceptions was the size of the problem in the United States.

H: Mine too. I would have said, ‘Well, that happens overseas.’ But that’s not true. And also, where you put your money — into the clothes you buy, the food, the products. Pay attention. Do the companies use trafficked persons? Because, human trafficking is more than sex trafficking. There’s slave labor, forced labor, bondage. I’m ashamed to even go through my closet and see that most of the stuff that I own is probably made by a slave.

I just read the latest watch-list and found out IKEA is horrendous for their use of slaves. IKEA and Hollister, and I forget the others that were on top, but I was just like, ‘Oh, gosh.’ And people are generally becoming aware of free trade coffee.

D: Right.

H: That’s kind of becoming a trendy thing. But we don’t realize the scope of it and how much of it is used, how much [clothing] is produced using slave labor. I mean, you see a nice blazer in a store, probably cost, like 60 bucks. And you’d probably think, ‘Hey, good quality, name brand, that’s a decent price. 60 bucks.’ The woman in Bolivia who produced that, probably gets paid a dollar per coat she produces and it probably takes her two days to make the coat.

D: And that dollar for the two days is all she gets?

H: That’s all she gets, and probably, she has three kids. I’m totally making up this scenario, but…

D: But it’s almost like a statistically proven hypothetical.

H: Yeah.

D: I think hearing even just a little bit of this, it’s easy to get the feeling of ‘Oh, there’s so much…again, it seems so impossible to…’

H: It’s so big, I can’t do anything.

D: Right. So where did you get the inspiration to keep going?

H: In truth, I’m still a newbie in this field. There’re people who’ve been doing this a lot longer and who know a lot more than I do.

D: Sure, but to actually say, ‘Yes, I’m going to go on this trip…’

H: Yes. The more closely I come into contact with who God is, and what God’s desire is for all of His creation, for each individual human being, the more sickened I am by things that are happening to these people. Every single person is created in the image of God. I have the image of God, you have the image of God, each person has the image of God. But also, collectively as humanity, we bear the image of God. I don’t think we fully understand what it does to us when that image is stomped on, even if it’s not personally stomped on in me. It effects us all.

D: It’s like a dedication to the image of God and to prize the image of God in other people.

H: I really truly believe we are marring and distorting something beyond what we can measure and we don’t understand the cost. We really don’t understand the cost.

When we ignore, or fail to fully understand what it means to bear the image, I mean the imago dei, the image of God within us is part of what helps us understand who God is. So if we’re not in touch with God, if we’re trampling on it, then of course we’re going to have a misunderstanding of God.

D: So what have you done in so far as preparing for this trip?

H: I found I don’t really know how to prepare. I mean I sit down and get out my journal and pray be like, ‘Okay God, how do I emotionally prepare for this?’ And then I would realize what I just said and say, ‘How do you emotionally prepare yourself to see a 4 year old child rescued from a brothel?’ I think that should shock and horrify me. I don’t think I should be prepared for that. So, beyond making sure I have bug spray and everything, I don’t know what other preparations to make.

I know I’m going into something I’m not fully prepared for, but in many ways, I think it’s good that I’m unprepared. Because I think to go and see that, I mean I don’t know what I’ll feel like after this.

For more information concerning WorldHope, please visit www.worldhope.org. For more information concerning International Justice Mission, please visit www.ijm.org.

Dominic Laing is a writer, director, editor, and anything else. He lives in Pasadena, Calif. For more of his writing, please visit www.dominiclaing.com

So long as we love, we serve;
So long as we are loved by others,
I would almost say that we are indispensable;
And no one is useless while they have a friend.
– Robert Louis Stevenson

Justice. It’s a word denoting the concept of moral rightness based on ethics, rationality, law, and equity. History is littered with attempts to define it philosophically, pragmatically, existentially and scientifically. Every page of world history tells a story of justice or injustice, intertwined with the story of civilization.

But that’s so macrocosmic! Such a large scale. To truly define justice we have to get closer. How do I define justice? Justice, for me, is not a concept to play with. For me it is the real desire for equality in the realm of society.

Society? That’s still too large. While justice remains a global ideal, it happens one person at a time, in places like Little Flower Mercy Ministry in India. Started in 1988 by Mathew Manuel and Molly Manuel, Little Flower is a place devoid of the jargon of justice one often sees today. Instead, it is a place where 200 examples of God’s definition of justice reside.

At Little Flower, the orphaned, the mentally impaired, the old and extreme poor are given the basic amenities of life and the opportunity to share in the joy of life as purposed by God. Rejected by their society built on the law, these people find themselves for the first time with an equal opportunity to exploit their God-given potential. Children have hope for the future, mentally impaired have a community who understands them, older people have a place to be comforted and cared for.

While I was there, questions kept popping up in my mind. Society is littered with people with no hope and justice – Am I not the vehicle of God to reach out to them? By not doing so, am I identifying myself with the society rather than with the purpose of God?

Such acts of kindness start with a man who dares to love people as God has loved him. Robert M. Pirsig was right when he said, “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.”

Little Flower Mercy Ministry relies on donations to help them help others. If you are interested in helping, please contact Hope Ink for more information.

Prince Varghese is a photographer from Kerala, India, which is often called “God’s Own Country.” Prince became interested in photography watching his father take pictures with his old Yashica Electro 35. Prince seeks to understand different people groups – their values, lifestyle, environment and struggles – and frame their story without any words.

Happy Reading,
Lauren Nelson
Editor, Hope Ink)

It is impossible to begin this lecture without again expressing my deep appreciation to the Nobel Committee of the Norwegian Parliament for bestowing upon me and the civil rights movement in the United States such a great honor. Occasionally in life there are those moments of unutterable fulfillment which cannot be completely explained by those symbols called words. Their meaning can only be articulated by the inaudible language of the heart. Such is the moment I am presently experiencing. I experience this high and joyous moment not for myself alone but for those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize.

This evening I would like to use this lofty and historic platform to discuss what appears to me to be the most pressing problem confronting mankind today. Modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think and instruments that peer into the unfathomable ranges of interstellar space. He has built gigantic bridges to span the seas and gargantuan buildings to kiss the skies. His airplanes and spaceships have dwarfed distance, placed time in chains, and carved highways through the stratosphere. This is a dazzling picture of modern man’s scientific and technological progress.

Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

Every man lives in two realms, the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live. Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal to become lost in the external. We have allowed the means by which we live to outdistance the ends for which we live. So much of modern life can be summarized in that arresting dictum of the poet Thoreau1: “Improved means to an unimproved end”. This is the serious predicament, the deep and haunting problem confronting modern man. If we are to survive today, our moral and spiritual “lag” must be eliminated. Enlarged material powers spell enlarged peril if there is not proportionate growth of the soul. When the “without” of man’s nature subjugates the “within”, dark storm clouds begin to form in the world.

This problem of spiritual and moral lag, which constitutes modern man’s chief dilemma, expresses itself in three larger problems which grow out of man’s ethical infantilism. Each of these problems, while appearing to be separate and isolated, is inextricably bound to the other. I refer to racial injustice, poverty, and war.

The first problem that I would like to mention is racial injustice. The struggle to eliminate the evil of racial injustice constitutes one of the major struggles of our time. The present upsurge of the Negro people of the United States grows out of a deep and passionate determination to make freedom and equality a reality “here” and “now”. In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a relatively small part of a world development.

We live in a day, says the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead2,”when civilization is shifting its basic outlook: a major turning point in history where the presuppositions on which society is structured are being analyzed, sharply challenged, and profoundly changed.” What we are seeing now is a freedom explosion, the realization of “an idea whose time has come”, to use Victor Hugo’s phrase3. The deep rumbling of discontent that we hear today is the thunder of disinherited masses, rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom, in one majestic chorus the rising masses singing, in the words of our freedom song, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around.”4 All over the world, like a fever, the freedom movement is spreading in the widest liberation in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and land. They are awake and moving toward their goal like a tidal wave. You can hear them rumbling in every village street, on the docks, in the houses, among the students, in the churches, and at political meetings. Historic movement was for several centuries that of the nations and societies of Western Europe out into the rest of the world in “conquest” of various sorts. That period, the era of colonialism, is at an end. East is meeting West. The earth is being redistributed. Yes, we are “shifting our basic outlooks”.

These developments should not surprise any student of history. Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, “Let my people go.”5 This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story. Something within has reminded the Negro of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers in Asia, South America, and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice.

Fortunately, some significant strides have been made in the struggle to end the long night of racial injustice. We have seen the magnificent drama of independence unfold in Asia and Africa. Just thirty years ago there were only three independent nations in the whole of Africa. But today thirty-five African nations have risen from colonial bondage. In the United States we have witnessed the gradual demise of the system of racial segregation. The Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools gave a legal and constitutional deathblow to the whole doctrine of separate but equal6. The Court decreed that separate facilities are inherently unequal and that to segregate a child on the basis of race is to deny that child equal protection of the law. This decision came as a beacon light of hope to millions of disinherited people. Then came that glowing day a few months ago when a strong Civil Rights Bill became the law of our land7. This bill, which was first recommended and promoted by President Kennedy, was passed because of the overwhelming support and perseverance of millions of Americans, Negro and white. It came as a bright interlude in the long and sometimes turbulent struggle for civil rights: the beginning of a second emancipation proclamation providing a comprehensive legal basis for equality of opportunity. Since the passage of this bill we have seen some encouraging and surprising signs of compliance. I am happy to report that, by and large, communities all over the southern part of the United States are obeying the Civil Rights Law and showing remarkable good sense in the process.

Another indication that progress is being made was found in the recent presidential election in the United States. The American people revealed great maturity by overwhelmingly rejecting a presidential candidate who had become identified with extremism, racism, and retrogression8. The voters of our nation rendered a telling blow to the radical right9. They defeated those elements in our society which seek to pit white against Negro and lead the nation down a dangerous Fascist path.

Let me not leave you with a false impression. The problem is far from solved. We still have a long, long way to go before the dream of freedom is a reality for the Negro in the United States. To put it figuratively in biblical language, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt and crossed a Red Sea whose waters had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance. But before we reach the majestic shores of the Promised Land, there is a frustrating and bewildering wilderness ahead. We must still face prodigious hilltops of opposition and gigantic mountains of resistance. But with patient and firm determination we will press on until every valley of despair is exalted to new peaks of hope, until every mountain of pride and irrationality is made low by the leveling process of humility and compassion; until the rough places of injustice are transformed into a smooth plane of equality of opportunity; and until the crooked places of prejudice are transformed by the straightening process of bright-eyed wisdom.

What the main sections of the civil rights movement in the United States are saying is that the demand for dignity, equality, jobs, and citizenship will not be abandoned or diluted or postponed. If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid.

The word that symbolizes the spirit and the outward form of our encounter is nonviolence, and it is doubtless that factor which made it seem appropriate to award a peace prize to one identified with struggle. Broadly speaking, nonviolence in the civil rights struggle has meant not relying on arms and weapons of struggle. It has meant noncooperation with customs and laws which are institutional aspects of a regime of discrimination and enslavement. It has meant direct participation of masses in protest, rather than reliance on indirect methods which frequently do not involve masses in action at all.

Nonviolence has also meant that my people in the agonizing struggles of recent years have taken suffering upon themselves instead of inflicting it on others. It has meant, as I said, that we are no longer afraid and cowed. But in some substantial degree it has meant that we do not want to instill fear in others or into the society of which we are a part. The movement does not seek to liberate Negroes at the expense of the humiliation and enslavement of whites. It seeks no victory over anyone. It seeks to liberate American society and to share in the self-liberation of all the people.

Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. I am not unmindful of the fact that violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones. Violence is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding: it seeks to annihilate rather than convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends up defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers.

In a real sense nonviolence seeks to redeem the spiritual and moral lag that I spoke of earlier as the chief dilemma of modern man. It seeks to secure moral ends through moral means. Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. Indeed, it is a weapon unique in history, which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man who wields it.

I believe in this method because I think it is the only way to reestablish a broken community. It is the method which seeks to implement the just law by appealing to the conscience of the great decent majority who through blindness, fear, pride, and irrationality have allowed their consciences to sleep.

The nonviolent resisters can summarize their message in the following simple terms: we will take direct action against injustice despite the failure of governmental and other official agencies to act first. We will not obey unjust laws or submit to unjust practices. We will do this peacefully, openly, cheerfully because our aim is to persuade. We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts. We will always be willing to talk and seek fair compromise, but we are ready to suffer when necessary and even risk our lives to become witnesses to truth as we see it.

This approach to the problem of racial injustice is not at all without successful precedent. It was used in a magnificent way by Mohandas K. Gandhi to challenge the might of the British Empire and free his people from the political domination and economic exploitation inflicted upon them for centuries. He struggled only with the weapons of truth, soul force, non-injury, and courage10.

In the past ten years unarmed gallant men and women of the United States have given living testimony to the moral power and efficacy of nonviolence. By the thousands, faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white, have temporarily left the ivory towers of learning for the barricades of bias. Their courageous and disciplined activities have come as a refreshing oasis in a desert sweltering with the heat of injustice. They have taken our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. One day all of America will be proud of their achievements11.

I am only too well aware of the human weaknesses and failures which exist, the doubts about the efficacy of nonviolence, and the open advocacy of violence by some. But I am still convinced that nonviolence is both the most practically sound and morally excellent way to grapple with the age-old problem of racial injustice.

A second evil which plagues the modern world is that of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, it projects its nagging, prehensile tentacles in lands and villages all over the world. Almost two-thirds of the peoples of the world go to bed hungry at night. They are undernourished, ill-housed, and shabbily clad. Many of them have no houses or beds to sleep in. Their only beds are the sidewalks of the cities and the dusty roads of the villages. Most of these poverty-stricken children of God have never seen a physician or a dentist. This problem of poverty is not only seen in the class division between the highly developed industrial nations and the so-called underdeveloped nations; it is seen in the great economic gaps within the rich nations themselves.

Take my own country for example. We have developed the greatest system of production that history has ever known. We have become the richest nation in the world. Our national gross product this year will reach the astounding figure of almost 650 billion dollars. Yet, at least one-fifth of our fellow citizens – some ten million families, comprising about forty million individuals – are bound to a miserable culture of poverty. In a sense the poverty of the poor in America is more frustrating than the poverty of Africa and Asia. The misery of the poor in Africa and Asia is shared misery, a fact of life for the vast majority; they are all poor together as a result of years of exploitation and underdevelopment. In sad contrast, the poor in America know that they live in the richest nation in the world, and that even though they are perishing on a lonely island of poverty they are surrounded by a vast ocean of material prosperity.

Glistening towers of glass and steel easily seen from their slum dwellings spring up almost overnight. Jet liners speed over their ghettoes at 600 miles an hour; satellites streak through outer space and reveal details of the moon. President Johnson, in his State of the Union Message12, emphasized this contradiction when he heralded the United States’ “highest standard of living in the world”, and deplored that it was accompanied by “dislocation; loss of jobs, and the specter of poverty in the midst of plenty”.

So it is obvious that if man is to redeem his spiritual and moral “lag”, he must go all out to bridge the social and economic gulf between the “haves” and the “have nots” of the world. Poverty is one of the most urgent items on the agenda of modern life.

There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it. More than a century and a half ago people began to be disturbed about the twin problems of population and production. A thoughtful Englishman named Malthus wrote a book13 that set forth some rather frightening conclusions. He predicted that the human family was gradually moving toward global starvation because the world was producing people faster than it was producing food and material to support them. Later scientists, however, disproved the conclusion of Malthus, and revealed that he had vastly underestimated the resources of the world and the resourcefulness of man.

Not too many years ago, Dr. Kirtley Mather, a Harvard geologist, wrote a book entitled Enough and to Spare14. He set forth the basic theme that famine is wholly unnecessary in the modern world. Today, therefore, the question on the agenda must read: Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with the basic necessities of life? Even deserts can be irrigated and top soil can be replaced. We cannot complain of a lack of land, for there are twenty-five million square miles of tillable land, of which we are using less than seven million. We have amazing knowledge of vitamins, nutrition, the chemistry of food, and the versatility of atoms. There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds, and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. Just as nonviolence exposed the ugliness of racial injustice, so must the infection and sickness of poverty be exposed and healed – not only its symptoms but its basic causes. This, too, will be a fierce struggle, but we must not be afraid to pursue the remedy no matter how formidable the task.

The time has come for an all-out world war against poverty. The rich nations must use their vast resources of wealth to develop the underdeveloped, school the unschooled, and feed the unfed. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these”. Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that men are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see men hungry, to see men victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them. The wealthy nations must go all out to bridge the gulf between the rich minority and the poor majority.

In the final analysis, the rich must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny. All life is interrelated, and all men are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich, and the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brothers’ keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality. John Donne interpreted this truth in graphic terms when he affirmed15:

No man is an Iland, intire of its selfe: every
man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the
maine: if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea,
Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie
were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends
or of thine owne were: any mans death
diminishes me, because I am involved in
Mankinde: and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

A third great evil confronting our world is that of war. Recent events have vividly reminded us that nations are not reducing but rather increasing their arsenals of weapons of mass destruction. The best brains in the highly developed nations of the world are devoted to military technology. The proliferation of nuclear weapons has not been halted, in spite of the Limited Test Ban Treaty16. On the contrary, the detonation of an atomic device by the first nonwhite, non-Western, and so-called underdeveloped power, namely the Chinese People’s Republic17, opens new vistas of exposure of vast multitudes, the whole of humanity, to insidious terrorization by the ever-present threat of annihilation. The fact that most of the time human beings put the truth about the nature and risks of the nuclear war out of their minds because it is too painful and therefore not “acceptable”, does not alter the nature and risks of such war. The device of “rejection” may temporarily cover up anxiety, but it does not bestow peace of mind and emotional security.

So man’s proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. In a day when vehicles hurtle through outer space and guided ballistic missiles carve highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can claim victory in war. A so-called limited war will leave little more than a calamitous legacy of human suffering, political turmoil, and spiritual disillusionment. A world war – God forbid! – will leave only smoldering ashes as a mute testimony of a human race whose folly led inexorably to ultimate death. So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Therefore, I venture to suggest to all of you and all who hear and may eventually read these words, that the philosophy and strategy of nonviolence become immediately a subject for study and for serious experimentation in every field of human conflict, by no means excluding the relations between nations. It is, after all, nation-states which make war, which have produced the weapons which threaten the survival of mankind, and which are both genocidal and suicidal in character.

Here also we have ancient habits to deal with, vast structures of power, indescribably complicated problems to solve. But unless we abdicate our humanity altogether and succumb to fear and impotence in the presence of the weapons we have ourselves created, it is as imperative and urgent to put an end to war and violence between nations as it is to put an end to racial injustice. Equality with whites will hardly solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a society under the spell of terror and a world doomed to extinction.

I do not wish to minimize the complexity of the problems that need to be faced in achieving disarmament and peace. But I think it is a fact that we shall not have the will, the courage, and the insight to deal with such matters unless in this field we are prepared to undergo a mental and spiritual reevaluation – a change of focus which will enable us to see that the things which seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under the sentence of death. We need to make a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world which is now possible, “the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”18.

We will not build a peaceful world by following a negative path. It is not enough to say “We must not wage war.” It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace. There is a fascinating little story that is preserved for us in Greek literature about Ulysses and the Sirens. The Sirens had the ability to sing so sweetly that sailors could not resist steering toward their island. Many ships were lured upon the rocks, and men forgot home, duty, and honor as they flung themselves into the sea to be embraced by arms that drew them down to death. Ulysses, determined not to be lured by the Sirens, first decided to tie himself tightly to the mast of his boat, and his crew stuffed their ears with wax. But finally he and his crew learned a better way to save themselves: they took on board the beautiful singer Orpheus whose melodies were sweeter than the music of the Sirens. When Orpheus sang, who bothered to listen to the Sirens?

So we must fix our vision not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but upon the positive affirmation of peace. We must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war. Somehow we must transform the dynamics of the world power struggle from the negative nuclear arms race which no one can win to a positive contest to harness man’s creative genius for the purpose of making peace and prosperity a reality for all of the nations of the world. In short, we must shift the arms race into a “peace race.” If we have the will and determination to mount such a peace offensive, we will unlock hitherto tightly sealed doors of hope and transform our imminent cosmic elegy into a psalm of creative fulfillment.

All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war; the solution of these problems is in turn dependent upon man squaring his moral progress with his scientific progress, and learning the practical art of living in harmony. Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested story plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a big house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterners and Westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, Moslem and Hindu, a family unduly separated in ideas, culture, and interests who, because we can never again live without each other, must learn, somehow, in this one big world, to live with each other.

This means that more and more our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. We must now give an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in our individual societies.

This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response which is little more than emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John19:
Let us love one another: for love is of God; and everyone
that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His
love is perfected in us.

Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. As Arnold Toynbee20 says: “Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word.” We can no longer afford to worship the God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. Love is the key to the solution of the problems of the world.

Let me close by saying that I have the personal faith that mankind will somehow rise up to the occasion and give new directions to an age drifting rapidly to its doom. In spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away, and out of the womb of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened to those at the bottom of society. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are developing a new sense of “some-bodiness” and carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. “The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.”21 Here and there an individual or group dares to love, and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. So in a real sense this is a great time to be alive. Therefore, I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted that the easygoing optimism of yesterday is impossible. Granted that those who pioneer in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms, painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden, and the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted that we face a world crisis which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life’s restless sea. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities. It can spell either salvation or doom. In a dark confused world the kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

* Dr. King delivered this lecture in the Auditorium of the University of Oslo. This text is taken from Les Prix Nobel en 1964. The text in the New York Times is excerpted. His speech of acceptance delivered the day before in the same place is reported fully both in Les Prix Nobel en 1964 and the New York Times.
1. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), American poet and essayist.
2. Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947). British philosopher and mathematician, professor at the University of London and Harvard University.
3. “There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world and that is an idea whose time has come.” Translations differ; probable origin is Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un crime, “Conclusion-La Chute”, chap. 10.
4. “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” is the title of an old Baptist spiritual.
5. Exodus 5:1; 8:1; 9:1; 10:3.
6. “Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka”, 347 U.S. 483, contains the decision of May 17, 1954, requiring desegregation of the public schools by the states. “Bolling vs. Sharpe”, 347 U.S. 497, contains the decision of same date requiring desegregation of public schools by the federal government; i.e. in Washington, D.C. “Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka”, Nos. 1-5. 349 U.S. 249, contains the opinion of May 31, 1955, on appeals from the decisions in the two cases cited above, ordering admission to “public schools on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed”.
7. Public Law 88-352, signed by President Johnson on July 2, 1964.
8. Both Les Prix Nobel and the New York Times read “retrogress”.
9. Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by a popular vote of 43, 128, 956 to 27,177,873.
10. For a note on Gandhi, seep. 329, fn. 1.
11. For accounts of the civil rights activities by both whites and blacks in the decade from 1954 to 1964, see Alan F. Westin, Freedom Now: The Civil Rights Struggle in America (New York: Basic Books, 1964), especially Part IV, “The Techniques of the Civil Rights Struggle”; Howard Zinn, SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Eugene V. Rostow, “The Freedom Riders and the Future”, The Reporter (June 22, 1961); James Peck, Cracking the Color Line: Nonviolent Direct Action Methods of Eliminating Racial Discrimination (New York: CORE, 1960).
12. January 8, 1964.
13. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
14. Kirtley F. Mather, Enough and to Spare: Mother Earth Can Nourish Every Man in Freedom (New York: Harper, 1944).
15. John Donne (1572?-1631), English poet, in the final lines of “Devotions” (1624).
16. Officially called “Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons Tests in Atmosphere, in Outer Space, and Underwater”, and signed by Russia, England, and United States on July 25, 1963.
17. On October 16, 1964.
18. Hebrews II: 10.
19. I John 4:7-8, 12.
20. Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889- ), British historian whose monumental work is the 10-volume A Study of Story (1934-1954).
21. This quotation may be based on a phrase from Luke 1:79, “To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”; or one from Psalms 107:10, “Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death”; or one from Mark Twain’s To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901), “The people who sit in darkness have noticed it…”.
From Nobel Lectures, Peace 1951-1970, Editor Frederick W. Haberman, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1972

Take a deep breath. Sniff down deep under the layers of Febreeze, and day-old potato chips and you can smell it.
OK, if we had really had scratch and sniff going on, it would actually smell like unwashed bodies and possibly five-day-old alcohol breath.

But to me, and those I work with, it smells like joy.

Yes, I run this little corner of the universe called Hope Ink, but I do it in association with Youth With A Mission Pismo Beach. We’re a little conclave of a much larger international group of Christian missionaries whose sole joy is sharing the love of Christ with those we meet. In addition to my editor duties here at Hope Ink, I spend a lot of quality time loving on people.

One group we particularly reach is the homeless community. You would think that in an idyllic setting like the Central Coast, you wouldn’t see people with such hardships, but homelessness is quite prevalent here. Take a walk in downtown San Luis Obispo, or cruise Highway 1 through Oceano, and there they are. Lounging on the grass, pedaling single-speed bikes laden with cans, playing guitar barefoot.

You would think they are so visible they would be unavoidable, but after three years here, I’m pretty sure that Mary Poppins was right: Some people cannot see anything past the end of their own nose.

Sadly, when I first moved to California, I was one of these people. I had not really had any interaction with the homeless, and it made me uncomfortable to be around people who came from such a different background. Then one day my friend Cody brought some home so he could feed them some lunch.

My mind revolted. Clean, good-smelling couch + dirty, smelly homeless person = dirty, smelly couch. This did not sit well with me, but the polite Southerner in me could not deny anyone hospitality.

That first day, I kept busy, trying to avoid contact as much as possible. I kept busy to avoid the smell and the ugly looks I would undoubtedly give them as I watched them turn my clean couch to a dirty one.

But one day, I started talking to one of the women who came to our house weekly for dinner and conversation.
Patta was the most belligerently drunk person I had ever come in contact with. She made no effort to hide her drunkenness. The years of alcohol abuse had whittled her 60-something-year-old brain down to the most basic of child-like needs.

Of course, there was pity there, but Patta was also full of spit-fire. She had a grip that belied her frail frame, and she could hug with the best of them.

Beneath the drunken exterior beat a heart of gold, and my heart reached out to this ragged, flawed, but infinitely precious woman.

For two years, I saw Patta through dark as well as light times. Times where she would beg me to take her money so she wouldn’t spend it on alcohol, only to come back a week later to ask for it back.

Times of repentance, where she would go into a safe house away from the streets, and moments of frustration when we would find her back on the street.

Patta once told me that she loved all of us, and we were her friends, because we took the time to listen to her. Not that we fed her, or gave her clothes, although we did those things too. We didn’t do much, perhaps, in the eyes of the world, but we filled one of the needs she most lacked: a sense of dignity.

Instead of just another ragged face on the street, she became a friend, reconnected to a society that had left her out.
Patta is now off the street, living with a Christian woman in Oceano, hopefully for good. It is her image that I keep in my mind with every person I help.

Now when a street kid comes in and has a seat on my couch, I think of all that simple act of bestowing dignity can mean.

And I think of the joy that they will leave there when they are gone.

Faith, Hope And NOLA

“If there was no New Orleans, America would just be a bunch of free people dying of boredom.” — Judy Deck
There is the United States of America.
There is the South.
There is Louisiana.
And then there is New Orleans.
May Seventh, Seventeen-Eighteen.
La Nouvelle-Orléans.
Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and
The French Mississippi Company.
My life. My love. My city. My home.
I was born in San Jose, California. But I came alive in New Orleans.
Her story cannot be forgotten, and her voice must never be silenced.
She struts and sings, dances and screams for help.
Purple, green and gold, my love is beautiful and bold
and she’s drowning on August Twenty-Ninth, Two-Thousand and Five.
She’s drowning on August Thirtieth.
She’s drowning on August Thirty-First.
She’s drowning on September First, Second and Third
because there is no FEMA, no food, and no President for “refugees.”
Hurricane Katrina slams into the Gulf Coast, and
houses in the Lower Ninth Ward are inundated with over nine feet of water
and levees break
and the roof of the Superdome tears open
and Interstates Ten and Ninety fall into the ocean.
My heart is broken and her streets are flooding.
Eighty percent of my heart is underwater and I don’t know what to do.
They’re dying because they’re trapped in the attic.
Because the walls were supposed to hold.
New Orleans wails and mourns
and prevails and scorns those who wish her dead,
who wish to forget her and bury her under the waters.
The world could not go on without New Orleans, kicking and screaming since that wonderful seventh of May.
And those who’ve fallen in love with the city know that, and so we rebuild.
We play for keeps and we play for resurrection.
In my dreams it’s raining, and the waves are rushing
Lake Pontchatrain steel blue crush.
Then I see black Moses with trumpet armed, my Fat Tuesday miracle.
Suit black as night wrapped tight
the spirit of fiery New Orleans might fight and might right these wrongs;
might take, might make this broken city strong. Again.
You hope and you pray and you realize God loves New Orleans.
God didn’t flood the Lower Ninth Ward.
You’re mixing up God and the Corps of Engineers.
You set your hands on the heart of this city and you tell God
“Open my eyes—“
And He crushes you.
Miss Linda Lewis finds her brother dead in his home. She was under the false assumption that he’d evacuated. Her van has no middle seat because she took it out to make room for her belongings and Katrina washed it away. She drives through Orleans Parish and we are years beyond the storm and it looks it happened yesterday. “We ain’t back,” she says. “Not even close.”
Mister Warren is old and homeless. His eyes are bloodshot and he sleeps all day. He loves Motown; The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, The Supremes.
Tomorrow he sleeps against a park statue that looks like a hand. He sleeps there because he didn’t make it to the shelter in time and they ran out of beds.
Stephen Gonzales’ family has lived in St. Bernard Parish for two-hundred and thirty-seven years. He takes care of his feeble wife and escapes his house after it floods in a matter of minutes. In the twelve months after the storm, his wife loses strength and dies of a broken heart.
Lucas Russ laments his friends, gone because rent has tripled, because most everyone packed into a bus in September of two-thousand-and-five was given a one-way ticket and they didn’t know where they were going, and they weren’t told how to get back. His friends don’t know how to get back to the city they love. They don’t see houses in which to live, schools in which to send their children, or jobs in which to work.
“The only way to get back into New Orleans is to die. They can’t feed you, clothe you or house you, but they can damn sure bury you.”
“I wonder how man can build a spaceship and walk on the moon, but he can’t fix the levees.”
“Ain’t nothing changing but the time on their watch.”
“It’s hard…It’s hard…”
And now you throw up your hands, and with it all the love and hate and rage and confusion and despair and wonder and awe and fury inside of you.
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani, you asshole? What did they ever do to you?
You are in the wind you are in the whisper, but right now I feel that neither is doing much good. And I’m sorry…but actually, I’m not.
I’m angry that things are still like this. I’m angry things have not changed.
In my dreams the Lower Ninth Ward is the Red Sea,
giant jazz-blasting away water and past.
In my dreams there is resurrection and healing.
And in this hopeless moment, I feel the wind.
In this darkest hour, I hear the music.
And I hear His whisper. I hear His love.
A Love Supreme at all costs.
It swoons and sorrows and rises and beats back the night.
God’s love and Christ himself buddy, bringing the Saints who come marching in.
Hot heat in the hot hall,
small hall smoke-filled sweat beads
sink down purple green and gold light
moonlight packed in
to-night
for the Preservation Jazz,
for the four on the floor, St. Peter Street Serenaders Preservation Jazz.
To preserve and protect
to reflect the shining light of the all night so right so tight New Orleans,
REnew REvive REstore
for man is more than wind and water.
Man is greater than hurricane weather,
and whether or not you believe it
you and I will build this home together
and we will sleep in its bed
and rest our collective head on its pillow
and we will have to think about what we’ve done together.
And music is made together.
The trumpet machine-gunning
on the skins a drum-drumming,
the piano keys dancing
ebony ivory tossing back sharps and flats
crescendo crashing smashing into a beautiful New with
bass line heart-thumping
and the voices of the saints be calling us home.
The saints go march
go round and call out and shout out and belt out and break out
and bust out and bust down barriers,
treble and bass, economy and race,
whatever lines lie between you and me
they lie to us
about who we ought to trust and these lines
these lies
they push us apart.
But when we step through the doors of the Preservation…
we.
are.
Together.
Because Together is what we are called to be.
We are St. James Infirmed,
and in the sweltering night the healing will come.
The music will come and save our souls.
God won’t you bless the Preservation…
I love this city at all costs and at all potential for criticism.
I will show you a city the likes of which you have never seen.
It is the greatest show on earth, the greatest tragic, x-on-the-door, feet-on-the-shore-mississippi-satchel-mouth-heart-as-big-as-the-crescent-moon show on earth.
Watch because something’s happening. New Orleans is turning a corner. Because people care enough to love the city and love the people and love what it means to be New Orleanian. This is the love that wraps around the whole world and teaches the rookies how to second-line.
Jesus Christ is my mighty-mighty Mardi Gras Chief,
united-as-one-Lake-Pontchatrain-son.
New Orleans, Louisiana. Bonjour, mon ami. Where y’at, baby?
Now recruiting for the New Orleans Five-Oh-Four Armored Division.
Must know how to:
Play trombone, drums, trumpet, clarinet, tuba, saxophone and guitar.
Cook Gumbo, Étoufée, Crawfish, Catfish, Crayfish, Shrimp, Lobster, Po-Boy, Atchafalaya, Muffulettas.
Sing, dance, smoke, drink, pray, love, love, love and never give up.
My life. My love. My city. My home. Laissez les bons temps rouler. Let the good times roll and roll and evermore roll. God Bless New Orleans.

Photo provided by Kellie Linder.

Rainy Season Rising

Sometimes the monks rode on top of trucks,
Their robes blowing back.
Blur. Beetle-nut color.
The superhero capes of Myanmar at superhero speeds.
It was natural to kneel here.
Water from the rain sat smooth upon the tiles.
The bare feet of monks and merit-seekers move slow.
Incense and jasmine lilt
upon the softer fog of the rainy season rising,
and I prayed too.

Their hands as they put them together
touched ephemeral.
If this falls through;
There are always golden owls.
There are always bells.

Easter Drama in India

Our Jesus hadn’t eaten for a couple of days.
Traveler’s sickness was pulling out his strength. The black
shirts were all too quiet for Calcutta: City of Color.

Our Jesus broke his heart easier this morning.
His tired arms fell from the cross with relief, readiness
to be held to our dust. For a few measures,
it was good Friday. It was the slums of this city
fifty years ago; the trafficked girls in San Francisco;
the Karen fleeing into Thailand.

While he hung his head, while the music slowed,
the Holocaust itself descended upon his shoulders like the last plague
of Egypt- and in this way, every event of earth connects.
He started to breathe.
Inhale. Beat, Exhale. I maybe heard the curtain ripping.

That carefully preserved canvas of blood. Ripping. And the Levites
pulling at their hair in horror- The Holy leaking out everywhere.
A downbeat and explode. The cave went supernova and the thick fumes
of Uganda, Palestine, and the Bolshevik revolution
were sucked into the nether-space.

Watermelons in India

We ate with our hands as the Bengali woman taught us.
It was late at night and loud with honking taxis in the heat.
I don’t think I was remotely hungry, but it is rude not to eat.
Even more rude if there are people starving down the block.
After rice and roti, she gave us watermelon.
But India was bananas and mangoes to me.
Watermelon meant the fourth of July back home.
For barbeques and the picnics of people who wear sweaters at night
and drive home on quiet streets.
Tonight I know that watermelon was made for India.
It was a clean chance at hydration.
It was all over my face.
I swallowed the seeds, and I saw how badly the watermelon
would like to populate the earth.
Just so the kids dying from holy rivers
would have something sweet to quench their thirst.

Virtues of Vaseline

It takes movement to lift a child. Awe to watch him sleep.
I am no physician, but my father is.
That seemed to be enough. Thrust into a closet with metal cabinets.
Prescriptions. Medicine, expired, in Hindi, in German, in Spanish.
A bottle of clean water.
The train station kids came in one by one.
Presented their battle wounds. The battle of living
on a crowded and careless earth. Vaseline. Gauze.

We can use those for anything. Most of the kids still wanted a bandage.
I had nothing to make them not hurt.
Glue, they said. That is another thing we can use for almost anything.
They were exhausted at mid-day because guards catch them at night.
Make them leave, hit them with sticks. My sister sat on the floor,
instantly had three heads on her lap, the children wanting to sleep
just once under benevolent hands.

I knew that if she would simply wash her eye in decent water,
the infection would fade. She said she would not.
I used Vaseline.
One of the kids was trying to choke the other. Had him flat
amid the scarred building blocks, I shouted because a child
was in my arms, and my brother pulled the aggressor away and fell
to his knees before him, murmuring “Oh no, no don’t be this way. Please.”

I prayed for a visual gift of tongues to read the medicine bottles.
Checked again. No good. Excuse me; did they by chance have antibiotics?
No. Vaseline then. I prayed for God to make it sting.
When I had heads in my lap like that, nestling into my legs,
I would have disarmed a mad Calcutta taxi.
I would have done it without waking the darlings.