"WE MUST HOLD"

 “WE MUST HOLD”

When our son David was in elementary school, he played on a local soccer team.  In his first year, most of the soccer games looked like a scrum in rugby – all the players surrounded the ball and sought to kick it free.  Somewhere in one of those years, his coach had to be away for one of the games, and since I came to every game anyway, the coach asked me to sub for him as coach for that one game.  I said “Yes,” but the problem was that I knew very little about soccer.  When I gathered the players to get ready for the game, it was obvious that they knew more than I did about soccer.  Caroline took a photo of my “coach’s” meeting with the team before the game began, and David can be seen rolling his eyes at my instructions.  And, his response was accurate – I hardly knew what I was talking about.

I felt that sense of lostness for our country this past week as I watched some of the news coverage of the Trumpster’s and Hegseth’s talks to the leadership of the world’s most powerful military, generals and admirals who had been dragged from all over the world to hear speeches from men who had never served in the military, speeches designed to tell them to do something unconstitutional – send the national military into mostly Democratic cities, ostensibly to deal with the “crime” problem.  Though they did not roll their eyes (as David did), their stony silence rang loudly – who are these guys?

And, that is the question for us as we face up to the fact that the Trumpster seems hell-bent on ending our democracy and establishing an oligarchy, an authoritarian government run by rich people.  Whether he will act decisively to reduce the government during the shutdown, as he has said so often that he will do, his intent to shrink the depth and breadth of the federal government sees clear.  In order to do this, he is eviscerating both the legislative and the judicial branches of government, a hollowing out that we must seek to prevent at all costs.  Our resistance must be deep and strong.  What can we do?  Here are several suggestions, and I would welcome more from you.

We must speak up and act out.  Wherever we encounter Trumpism, we must stand against it.  We must resist with our words and our actions.  Caroline and I have been to many protests around the metro Atlanta area, and we must continue those.  Write letters to the editors, organize your friends and acquaintances (and call them out if necessary).  There is no longer room for compromise or deals, hoping that Trump will stand down or dilute his work.  His henchmen Russell Vought and Stephen Miller are feeling the vibe, and they intend to take it as far as they can.  We must speak and act against these, wherever we are and whenever we are.

Second, none of us will survive this onslaught alone, so find like-minded friends and acquaintances and build communities of resistance.  There are many groups out there who are already working on this, so join one or more of those. We will survive only by building cohesive and active communities of solidarity and resistance.

Third, register yourself to vote and make sure that all of your acquaintances are registered to vote.  Though this seems simple, it is absolutely essential.  We mounted a huge campaign to elect Barack Obama as president in 2008, and we must repeat that energy level again – our constitutional democracy depends upon it.  This may sound dire or even trite, but Trump 2.0 has proved much more aggressive and destructive than he was in his first term.  He must be stopped, first at the mid-terms and then in 2028.

Fourth, don’t forget the power of art to move hearts, minds and souls.  Go to plays about this (or write one yourself); go to movies about this; write poetry about it (yes, we all are poets), share laments with others (as long as those laments do not paralyze you).  Use the power of language to speak the truth and to call out the Trumpsters.  It is no coincidence that Trump is seeking to curtail opposition speech and actions, because he knows how powerful speech can be as a tool of resistance.

And, finally (for now), be bold in your witness.  Now is not the time to be timid or unsure about this.  The Trumpster is on a mission to destroy us as a democratic people, whether he is alive to see the transition or not.  We will not be able to count on the unseen hand of democracy to prevail.  It is now up to us to speak out and act up.  Order your steps and get going!

"THE MESSY WEEK"

 “THE MESSY WEEK”

Trump seems to have been emboldened by the death of Charlie Kirk, so much so that at a dinner this past week, some friends and I were musing over whether Tyler Robinson had actually been the shooter, or whether something else was afoot.  I was one of the people who are skeptical that Robinson is the shooter.  When I first heard what had happened - that someone had killed Kirk with a single shot from several hundred yards at a very difficult angle – I felt then that the shooter was a trained sniper, perhaps a military person.  Some of the friends last week with hunting experience felt that Robinson could have made the shot, but that if he did, he was very lucky.  There was much speculation over what had actually happened, and I am usually not a conspiracy theorist, but on this one, there is definitely more than meets the eye.

Trump seems to have taken the killing of Kirk as an opportunity to quickly advance his and shadow-president Stephen Miller’s agenda.  Four events stand out from last week:  the canceling of the Kimmel Show, the rambling speech at the UN, the ridiculous claim that acetaminophen causes autism, and the indictment of James Comey.  All of these seem to be steps that seek to solidify Trump’s claim that he is our only Savior.  Though Brendan Carr was careful to say that he had not forced Disney to cancel Kimmel, it was clear that he was acting like a Mafia warden, as even Ted Cruz pointed out.  The Kimmel firing caused such a ruckus that ABC and Disney had to bring him back, to a huge ratings boost.  It was one of the few hopeful signs this week.

Trump’s rambling, spiteful, attacking monologue at the UN seems to be straight out of King George III’s diatribes – I half expected Lin Manuel-Miranda, Leslie Odoms, Jr., and Alicia Philippa to pop out from “Hamilton” to sing about the coming revolution.  Not only was Trump irreverent and disrespectful, he just seemed out of it, unaware of where he was and what he was supposed to be doing.  It is one thing to tell the United Nations that it is irrelevant – it is another thing to deeply disrespect the UN and seek to show them that the powerful monarch of the USA is in charge.  We don’t what the long-term ramifications of Trump’s insulting and condescending speech will be, but we can rest assured that they will be deep and long-lasting.

It was sad (and maddening) to watch the spectacle at the HHS news conference where Trump and mini-RFK made the alleged connection between acetaminophen and autism.  Trump emphasized “Tylenol” because he clearly could not pronounce “acetaminophen,” and I’m sure he has no idea what it is.  I felt like I was back in the 1800’s, as Trump emphasized over and over again that pregnant women should just bite the bullet, take the pain, endure the hardships (and dangers) of fever – as if he had ever been pregnant or had the willpower to “just take the pain.”  No evidence presented, just opinions from old white men telling women and everyone else that old white men know best.  The biggest problem, of course, is that this pronouncement comes with the back-up of what used to be one of the most respected public health agencies in the world.  Now, in Trump’s and mini-RFK’s hands, CDC is devolving into just another PAC for Trump, leaving the rest of us to wonder where we can get good public health advice.  

And, finally the indictment of James Comey.  Let me be clear that I am no fan of Comey’s.  Had he handled things correctly in 2016 in regard to Hilary Clinton’s emails, she would have won the 2016 presidential election, and Trump would have slumped back to his golden tower on Fifth Avenue.  I don’t think that you can be indicted for incompetence – if so, we would have many more indictments.  The issue is that this is the first stop on Trump’s “vengeance tour,” and that is the frightening part.  His next step is a shot at Fani Willis, who also demonstrated incompetence when she got involved with staffer Nathan Wade.  We don’t know who will be next, but they are coming.

All of this is to say that Trump is feeling his Geritol and whatever drugs they are giving him to stay awake, waiting for Stephen Miller’s next executive order to come down for him to sign.  Big events coming this week also, especially on Tuesday – the potential government shutdown and the military command gathering on the same day.  In some ways, it feels like Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming,” which begins with these lines:

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"

Yet, we must hold – more on that next week.

“MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

 “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA”

             Last week began the month of celebrating the heritage of the diaspora of people from Mexico, Central America, South America and the Caribbean, who are now in the USA.  Some have been here for centuries, predating the Anglo arrival, some arrived as recently as today.  The month is sandwiched between famous battles for independence by LatinX or Hispanic peoples from European colonial powers, and the dates are September 15-October 15. 

             The recognition began under President Johnson and was originally called Hispanic Heritage Week.  It has expanded into a month, and in line with the arbitrary nature of the American system of race, it is ever evolving.  “Hispanic” was the earliest term because it is a word derived from the Latin word for the Iberian Peninsula of Spain and Portugal (Hispana).  

            The word “Hispanic” began to fall out of favor, however, because it does not cover all the language groups in the brown Americas.  “Latino” has begun to develop as an alternative, and it is a strange term because no one speaks Latin in the brown Americas except priests and some scholars.  Vice-Presidential candidate Dan Quayle infamously noted that he would have to learn “Latin” before he visited Latin America.  Why did a word referring to a “dead” language from Italy become the definer for people from the brown Americas?  Because Latin is the basis for what were called the “Romance” languages when I was growing up:  Spanish, Portuguese, and French, which became the dominant European languages in the brown Americas.  “Latin X” has begun to replace the masculine “Latino” as a word of choice to include all people. 

             Whether one prefers “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latina” or “Latinx,” all of them still define people from the brown Americas by the history of the European domination of the region in the colonial era.  This crunching of experience is further squeezed by the American system of race, which demands to know who should be classified as “white” and who should not.  This demand, born out of the struggle between slavery and equality in American history, means that everyone must be assigned their place in the system of race, obliterating cultural and language differences, so that those classified as “white” may know where to assign the goodies of American racial capitalism.  One of the great things about “MES NACIONAL DE LA HEFRENCIA LATINX/HISPANA” is that we hope that it will lead to peoples of the Americas helping to break down the oppressive system of race.  We will be hoping and looking for more accurate and just terms and descriptions to emerge.

Currently, those hopes are being dashed on the Trumpian/MAGA plan to re-establish white supremacy as strongly as possible.  The mass deportations by the Trumpster are targeted mainly at people who are classified as “Hispanic.”  Indeed, SCOTUS recently approved racial profiling of Hispanic people by ICE agents, looking to deport more and more people classified as ”Hispanic.”  From SCOTUS’ point of view, racial profiling is out for college admissions but not for immigration issues.  Indeed, the main headline for Saturday’s AJC was a story indicating that Metropolitan Savannah Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce had canceled the annual Hispanic Heritage Parade there because of a surge in anti-Hispanic rhetoric and racial profiling by law enforcement.  

The profiling of brown people is just the beginning of the Trumpian manifesto to firmly re-establish white males as superior to all others.  The mass deportations are a direct attack on people of color, but it is not the ending of the MAGA movement.  It is rather the thematic prelude to attacking and marginalizing all individuals and groups who stand for the American ideals of justice, equity, and liberty.  In these days, let us remember who we are and where we have been.  Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoeller put it best during the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1940’s:  

First they came for the Communists 

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

So, let us remember this lesson in history in at least two ways this month.  Let us join our brown siblings in recognizing and celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month.  And second, let us speak out against the racial profiling of people of Hispanic heritage.  It is time to both speak out and act up.  

'SEWAGE SPILLING OUT"

 “SEWAGE SPILLING OUT”

In my 30+ years as pastor at Oakhurst Presbyterian, I unfortunately encountered many episodes of sewage spilling up from stopped up pipes at the church.  It was bad enough when one toilet would get stopped up, but we often had whole pipelines stopped up.  On those occasions, the sewage would overflow from a cleanout pipe in the floor somewhere – near the clothes closet, in the nursery, and in the day care center.  Caroline and I and many other people would often spend hours mopping or vacuuming up raw sewage.  I remember Fred Kuhstoss and I spending all one day cleaning up a sewage overflow from a toilet in the Phoenix day care center.  The remarkable Dave Hess heroically pulled up some stairs and worked under them to re-pipe one place where the stoppage was developing, but the main culprit was a long drain pipe outside, going UP a hill.  Finally in 2006-2007, we raised enough money to pay a contractor to take care of the problem.  

I thought of this process as I heard of the assassination of Charlie Kirk last week.  It is a sign of my white, male privilege that I did not know who he was until he was killed. The Black people with whom I talked all knew who he was because he was a throwback to the old racist tropes.  Though he was killed with a single shot, it reminded me of the continuing sewage spill of our love of, and indeed worship of, guns.  Kirk was one of those who advocated for the necessity of guns, and in no small irony, it was that belief in guns that took his life.  Let no one hear that I am applauding his death – it was abhorrent.  Yet, as we seem to be learning, his assassin was not a radical left advocate, as the President so inelegantly and prejudicially said.  Rather his killer seemed to be an adherent of an even harder right stand.

The hurling of epithets from the President and the right-wing commentators so reminded me of the sewage spills at Oakhurst.  They just keep on coming, and only strong actions will stop the sewage spills – strong actions like the banning of assault weapons (we did it from 1994-2004, until the Republican Congress let the ban expire); strong actions like stemming white supremacy, which is definitely on the rise;  strong actions like the assertion of the fundamental dignity and equality of every person.

And, like the many sewage pipes at Oakhurst, the sewage just continues to come at us from so many directions.  President Trump, instead of seeking to calm us down, fanned the flames of violence, as Hitler did in 1933 with the Reichstag fire.  SCOTUS last week agreed to racial profiling in the ICE raids, even though they had previously made such a big to-do against using racial classification as a factor in college admissions.  

I wish I could blame Donald Trump for all of this, but he is more the voice and the face of the sewage spills in American culture.  It began centuries ago in the idea of white supremacy, but its most recent manifestation came in the reaction to the election of Barack Obama as President.  Since then, so many people classified as “white” in our country have made it their mission to push people of color back as far as possible.  It began with the Tea Party movement in 2008, which produced such astonishing victories in the 2010 mid-terms, then morphed into Trumpism in 2015-2016.  

I wish I could say that it was only “race” that is the problem – that would be hard enough to solve, but economic factors play a big part too.  The Clinton/Gingrich partnership that gave us NAFTA, shifting many jobs overseas, also gave us this resentment from white people who lost their jobs in the process.  Race and economic factors have combined to make so many sewage spills flowing out of the pipes of our individual and collective mindsets, so much so that we are killing one another with our beloved guns.

I remember those dreary days of cleaning up sewage spills at Oakhurst.  It always helped to have others step in to assist, and I think that is a clue to our finding ways out of the current cultural mess.  As Pastor David Lewicki put it in his fine sermon yesterday at North Decatur Presbyterian, God is speaking to us just as She spoke to Abraham and Sarah.  God’s first word to them was not who She was but was rather: “Go.”  Go on a journey to help people find a new definition.  Let us do that too – let us take the first step, to reach out on a journey to proclaim dignity, equity, and justice.  It’s the only way to stop the sewage spills.

"SUSAN STROUPE!"

 “SUSAN STROUPE!”

Susan’s 43rd birthday is this Friday, September 12.  She was born in Nashville but lived there only 5 months before we accepted the call to Oakhurst Presbyterian Church and moved to Decatur.  She grew up in the multicultural church there, having many aunts and grandmas who helped to raise her.  We are grateful to the community of Oakhurst, which gave her such nourishment and gifts.

Today I’m remembering her sophomore/junior year of high school.  When she turned 16 and was just beginning her sophomore year, she got her learner’s permit to start learning to drive.  She indicated that Caroline did too much front seat driving, so I was elected to teach her to drive.  David had not yet gotten his driver’s license.  We practiced in the old DeVry parking lot not far from Dekalb hospital (that lot is now the VA), because it was usually deserted in the evenings and on weekends.  I also taught her how to parallel park in the lower parking lot of Oakhurst Presbyterian.  We would put two large garbage cans some feet apart, to simulate cars.  Susan was a fast learner, and it only took her a few lessons to get the parallel parking down.  

    In August of 1999, right before the start of her junior year in high school, she took the driver’s test.  Those were the days when the state of Georgia did not require applicants to drive on an actual road.  They had set up a driving course in the middle of the parking lot, where applicants took their driving tests.  We had an old Camry at that point, and it had many eccentricities.  One of them was that if you were using the air conditioning and cut the front wheels sharply to the left, the motor would shut off.  We knew that would not be acceptable to the driver’s license officials, so I advised her to roll down all the windows and tell the tester that the ac was broken.  It was one of those hot August days, and I watched as Susan began to take the test.  She did fine on it, and indeed she aced the parallel parking.  We had watched other youth take the test before it was Susan’s turn, and after the parallel parking part, there were still several parts of the test.  After Susan aced the parallel parking, the instructor told her to take the car back to the beginning.  When I saw that, I thought that Susan had failed miserably, and so did Susan.  When they got back to the beginning, the instructor told her:  “You’ve shown me enough – you made a 93 on the test, but I’ve just got to get out of this car.  I am just so damned hot in here.”

    I used the Camry as my ministerial car, and after Susan got her driver’s license, we worked out a deal on sharing the car.  She would take the Camry to school and leave it in the parking lot.  I would walk over in the morning, or Caroline would bring me over, to get the car for the day, and then bring it back to the school parking lot for Susan.  When she first started driving to school, she had a minor fender bumper accident, while she was creeping up in morning traffic on South Candler Street.  She looked down to get something and barely tapped the car ahead of her.  There was no visible damage to the other person’s car, but the other driver wanted to call the police to get an official report because it was her husband’s car.  The Decatur police came and ascertained no damage to the cars and no injuries to either driver.  The good part about this accident is that it was a relatively harmless lesson for Susan to learn that she must always keep her eyes on the road.  She also got another lesson in human relations on the road.  Later that week, the husband called to say that his wife was injured in the wreck, and that we should personally pay for her medical care so that our car insurance would not go up.  We were having none of it, and we called our insurance company to let them know what was going on.  They asked for a copy of the accident report from the police, so we went and got it and faxed (remember that ancient activity?) it to the insurance company.  We never heard anymore from anyone, but Susan had learned some good lessons early on.

    Ever since then, Susan has been an excellent driver, driving in all kinds of places – Minneapolis, Albuquerque, upstate New York, across the country when she was a puppeteer intern, and in crazy Baltimore. She also gave David some good advice on taking the driver’s test.  He was anxious about the test and put it off until he was a college student.  He saw that Susan had passed her driving test well, and I had also taught him how to drive.  Susan gave him a big and humorous boost.  She said: “David, think of the stupidest person you know who has a driver’s license.  They passed the test!”  That convinced him, and he went and passed the test, using some of the same strategy with the Camry that Susan had used.  

    We are so grateful for both of our children, but in this birthday week of Susan’s, we give thanks for her and for all her gifts to us and to so many others.  Thank you, Susan!!!!  Raise a glass to her on Friday!

"COMBAHEE RIVER RAID"

 COMBAHEE RIVER RAID”

Last week during our time at Tybee Island, we took time to visit the historical marker at the Combahee River, riding over the Harriet Tubman Memorial Bridge, to cross the River.  I posted photos and a short narrative about Harriet Tubman’s leading Union soldiers to make a raid on Confederate rice plantations and to free as many enslaved people as possible.  After that posting, several people thanked me for it and also expressed surprise about this raid.  In the raid, Tubman actually freed more enslaved people than she had in all her trips down South during the 1850’s.

In light of that surprise, I want to go into a bit more detail and encourage you to read more about it on your own.  It is one of the many sagas of Tubman’s life, a life filled with courage, risk, danger, and liberation.  The best version of the River Raid is Edda L. Fields-Black’s “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.”  It won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

After a decade of leading people to freedom in the decade of the 1850’s, Tubman signed up to work for the Union after the Civil War began.  She worked as a spy, scout, nurse, and cook, and then she was assigned to Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862 to work with people who had formerly been enslaved.  Port Royal was part of the Beaufort, South Carolina area, and it had been captured by Union troops in 1861.  The white planters had fled, leaving behind 10,000 newly freed people.  Tubman was assigned to work with them and begin to help them acclimate to life as free people.  All of this work was called the Port Royal Experiment, in which the Union wanted to see how easily formerly enslaved people could transfer into freedom.

The Union Army leaders quickly saw Tubman’s extraordinary abilities, even though she was illiterate.  They asked her if she would be willing to continue her role as a spy in enemy territory.  She agreed to do it, and she left the relative safe territory of Port Royal and went to islands and even inland to make contact with people still held in slavery, as well as to pick up information on the movements of the Confederate army.  Though she had some trouble understanding the language of the Gullah based people held in slavery there, her innate intelligence and skills soon helped her relate to those still held in slavery.

During this time, she came up with a plan that had several purposes:  a guerilla raid on the mainland to free enslaved people and to destroy the crops of the white planters, to give the Black Union soldiers experience in facing off with the Confederate army, and to be used as a weapon of terror for the Confederacy:  the Black Union soldiers were invading white territory and freeing enslaved people, while destroying crops and plantations.  The Union commanders were skeptical at first, but Tubman and Union colonel James Montgomery, who was trained in guerilla warfare, convinced the leaders to try it.  Montgomery would lead the 300 Black troops, while Tubman would provide the intelligence and guide the boats up the Combahee River.  Tubman then spent time as a spy in the area around the river, alerting the enslaved people that a possible escape was on the way – they should be ready to go on a moment’s notice.  The notice that it was time to go:  the steam whistles of the Union boats blowing several times.

On June 2, 1863, three Union boats went up the Combahee River and landed near the place where the ferry crossed the river.  The steam whistles blew, and in short order, enslaved people poured out of the woods, acting like the Hebrews leaving quickly from Egypt.  Tubman’s friend and first biographer Sarah Bradford recorded Tubman’s narrative in 1869, and here is part of it:

“I nebber see such a sight. We laughed, an' laughed, an' laughed. Here you'd see a woman wid a pail on her head, rice a smokin' in it jus' as she'd taken it from de fire, young one hangin' on behind, one han' roun' her forehead to hold on, t'other han' diggin' into de rice-pot, eatin' wid all its might; hold of her dress two or three more; down her back a bag with a pig in it. One woman brought two pigs, a white one an' a black one; we took 'em all on board; named de white pig named Beauregard and the black pig named Jeff Davis.  Sometimes de women would come wid twins hangin' roun' der necks; 'appears like I never see so many twins in my life; bags on der shoulders, baskets on der heads, and young ones taggin' behin', all loaded; pigs squealin', chickens screamin', young ones squallin'.”  Tubman later told another interviewer that it reminded her of the story of the children of Israel fleeing Egypt.

Tubman and the Union army freed at least 735 people that day – it was chaotic and dangerous and stunning.  Tubman had led a raid that stabbed at the heart of the Confederacy – freeing their enslaved people and destroying the rice plantations (which the Africans had taught the white people to grow).  Less than a month later, the Union Army drove the Confederates back at Gettysburg, and Grant captured Vicksburg (and my hometown of Helena), giving the Union control of most of the Mississippi River.  Tubman also put the idea of guerilla warfare into the minds of the Union generals.  Two years later General Sherman would employ much of the same tactics as he led the March to the Sea in Georgia.

Tubman was extraordinary in all that she did, and we should honor her and give thanks for her magnificent witness.  Yet, we dishonor her if we lift her so high that we lose sight of her ordinary beginnings as an illiterate, enslaved woman on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  She had cunning and courage for sure, but her story reminds us that we can do some of that too.  In these days of the sewage of the Trumpster flowing over the land, we will need to find ways to tap into that cunning and courage of Harriet Tubman.  May she be our North Star in these troubled days

"MORE HOPEFUL WORK"

 “MORE HOPEFUL WORK”

In these days when there are so many terrible and dispiriting events around us, I want to focus this week on some great work in a terrible place.  One of the unintended consequences of the Voting Rights Act and the end of neo-slavery was the mass incarceration that followed, including the huge uptick in the arrest, incarceration and conviction of Black people, especially Black men.  If we could not keep Black men down by preventing them from voting, we decided to keep them down by using the criminal legal system as a way to do it.  In 1965, the USA incarcerated 109 people per 100,000 population.  In 2024, that had increased to an astounding 580 per 100,000 – by far the highest rate in the world.  

When I was doing prison reform work for the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons in the early 1980’s, we operated on the premise that if we could demonstrate how much it cost to keep people incarcerated, then perhaps some of the conservative people who defended the incarceration system so strongly would change their minds and join us in seeking reform.  What we learned in that work, however, was that the white supremacy that undergirded the incarceration system was so deep that the cost of incarceration was not relevant to the issue.  That was a hard lesson, but it helped us to understand better how mass incarceration developed.

One of the people whom I met in that work in the 1980’s was John Cole Vodicka, who was then the Louisiana director for the Southern Coalition.  He remains one of the best organizers on incarceration issues whom I have ever met.  He and spouse Dee and Caroline and I became friends in those days, and we have remained friends ever since.  John and Dee have lived in Athens, Georgia, since 2018 to be near their children and grandchildren.  Since he has been in Athens, John and Steve Williams have started a Courtwatch and Bail Fund, in which they and other volunteers attend court in Athens to observe how defendants are treated.  In this work, they have helped their church to found the Oconee Street United Methodist (OSUMC) Bail Initiative, which seeks to help people to get out of jail while awaiting adjudication of their charges.  In his fine occasional blog called “Bearing Witness,” John shared this info about their bail program:  

“Typically, the OSUMC Community Bail Initiative tries to keep an eye out for pretrial prisoners who remain in our jail because they are without any monetary resources. Twenty-seven times now we've posted bonds as low as $1.  The highest bonds we've posted thus far were when I handed over $670 to the ACC sheriff's office to first spring Antonio C. from pretrial captivity in August 2022, then another $670 in January 2024 to get Louis P. out of jail.  In October 26, 2024, we posted $670 on behalf of Latif A., who until his bond was reduced to $500 spent 271 days of pretrial confinement in our jail. Since June 2021, we've gotten 157 men and women out of jail or off probation. We’ve also purchased 11 one-way bus tickets for people we’ve bailed out so they can leave Athens and return to family or friends elsewhere. Far more than half of those we’ve bailed out were homeless.  Many were essentially living hand-to-mouth, some with mental health diagnoses, others hounded by alcohol and/or drug-related issues.  Most were locked up after allegedly committing misdemeanor nuisance crimes or drug-related felony offenses.  As a result of their marginalization in our community, and their poverty, these women and men spent a combined 5,437 days in our jail before their cash bonds were posted or bus tickets purchased.”  

    John and his colleagues do such great work that the state of Georgia passed a law in 2024 that severely limited the ability of non-profit organizations to bail people out of jail.  SB 63 was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp in May 2024, and the law took effect on July 1, 2024.  Among other things, SB 63 prohibited charitable organizations—including faith communities—from posting bonds for more than three persons per year.   John and Steve joined forces with Barred Business to sue in federal court to stop the law from being enforced in Georgia. They were able to obtain a preliminary injunction on July 12, 2024 from U.S. District Judge Victoria Calvert.  The state appealed that decision to the Eleventh Circuit, and last week, a three-judge panel heard the case.  They should decide the case in the next few months, and if there is any justice at all, the Eleventh Circuit will strike down this unconstitutional law.

    So, I give thanks for John and Steve and their colleagues who do such fine and fundamental work.  If you would like to know more, contact John at johncvodicka@gmail.com. And, if you’d like to make a contribution towards their work, send it to John at 92 Brooklyn Rd., Athens, GA 30306, made out to “OSUMC Bail Fund.”  You’ll be glad that you did.