Beautiful day yesterday going through South Carolina and Georgia mostly on State highways. Georgia is beautiful and as I went through a long stretch of small towns I was struck with the variety and mixture of races and economic circumstances along the way. The poverty is staggering, as it is in all of the U.S. that I’ve seen along the minor highways. Yet in the South it doesn’t seem as crushing because it is so deeply institutionalized that the “Haves” don’t even notice the “don’t haves”, because so often they appear to live in third or fourth generations of housing with the two or three previous ones deteriorating along a line to the current habitation; in the line of sight of the moderate/middle class next door. It is apparently “just how things are”.

In most of the U.S. the poverty is kept in distinct neighborhoods with traffic routed around it; in the South its just next door and it is declared ok because that’s how things have always been, and course there are plenty of ‘neighborhoods’ where for long stretches of road its all just poor. When half the population is in poverty it must actually be hard to be aware of, let alone address, the concomitant issue of race and slavery as an institution.

The really crushing part is the de-humanization that apparently can’t be addressed directly, because, “…that’s how it is…”.

In the face of that reality, the world as constituted, is still an astoundingly beautiful place because it is within all of our natures to smile and to laugh within a mostly even mix of deprivation and pain in the heart.

In the hotel parking lot desperate pimps and their prey, the prostitutes, are trying to look confident while they prowl the parking lot of a working-class hotel that caters largely to construction related business and has lots of personal working “rigs” parked there and underfoot are fast, small, subtly colored lizards skittering and dodging about, while a bird I’ve never before heard, is whistling a cheerful tune and in all that moment, lives go on in a desperate struggle and dance through the one molecule thick veil of Ignorance. Just not knowing.

We are all doing our parts to help

clarify the world to ourselves,

not really out of despair but because of a

longing we may not even know is there.

The sun is nothing but the Sun.