The Tyrant King and the Princess of Easy-listening

In the den of the godless heathens

This has been a busy, but very interesting week. Every day it has been cold, the way it should be in February, and I have had to deal with going from freezing cold to "surface of the sun" every time I walk into a building on campus. I immediately strip off my coat and/or sweaters because it's so hot in there, I'll pass out if I don't. I have a theory about the school's central heating system. I think they have a dragon that they hit with a mallet to induce fire-breathing and warm the campus. I bet he's a pretty grumpy fellow.

Speaking of fire breathing, that leads me to my next topic - kind of. Before I get to that I must first go back to Thursday. I was walking though campus commons with a couple of friends before my 12:30 class and in the middle of the commons in a big circle were some protesters who were saving the campus trees. Apparently UNCW has decided to cut out a large swath of our campus' 200 acre pine forest to put up a parking garage and new dorm. UNCW is host to the largest patch of pine forest still standing in the city of Wilmington. Naturally, the hippies are upset. Well, I heard that they were cutting almost all of them down, which irritated me, so when my friend suggested we join them, I thought - what the heck.

Let me just say it right now - it feels really great to walk up to a group of protesters and hear their cheers and cries of support as you join their feeble but growing cause. I can honestly say that I now understand why so many people make it their life's work to be activists for so many different causes. In a moment I felt like a stately lion that would devour the jackal of corporate school government. I felt the swelling of my pride - pride that I was one of the few that cared enough to stand for such a noble cause. More than anything, I felt like I really mattered to someone.

It may have been 15 seconds after I sat down, 30 at the most, when I realized that I had made a terrible mistake.

"HAVING CLASS IS NO EXCUSE FOR MISSING A WALK-OUT! JOIN OUR PEACEFUL PROTEST," said the red-bearded fellow who was apparently in charge of everything, "GOING TO CLASS DEFEATS THE PURPOSE, THIS IS A WALK-OUT!"

"Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap!" is all that ran through my head. I had 20 minutes before my American Romanticism class started and there was a paper due in it. There was no way I was skipping that class to shout crudely at passers-by in support of the UNCW forest people. Suddenly, all those feelings of pride, self congratulation, and acceptance came flooding back on me in the horrifying light of knowing I was going to have to stand up and very obviously walk away from all of them in a matter of minutes. The red-bearded fellow kept repeating himself, and every time he said his bit I felt a little queasier. I didn't know how I was going to survive walking away to the jeering and social ridicule that I was sure to get. I had become the protester's arch-nemesis. I was the protester light.

I rocked back and forth like a crazy person as I devised a plan for leaving that involved waiting until someone coughed loudly and tearing off to the southeast. This, I decided, would be a fruitless effort since we were sitting in a circle and some of them would see me no matter what. At some point a funky looking girl with a scarf on her head came over to my friend and I with a piece of art paper paper and some oil paints. On the paper people had already painted several trees.

"We're painting a forest to show the school," she said with a smile, "you can paint a tree and then just pass it around."

I waited as my friend painted her tree. All around me the circle erupted into the chant, "Ain't no power like the power of the people, 'cause the power of the people don't stop (say what?)." They switched between that one and my preferred chant, "Save our trees!"

I wish more of my friends and family could have been there. It was wonderful - I was completely out of my element and I was totally cool with it (aside from the whole having to betray them within 15 minutes part). I lifted my voice and clapped my hands and let the world know that we were serious. I painted a colorful little tree on the paper and thought about how these people were an impassioned group of people that I had spent my entire life boxing up - never dealing with. As a general rule, protesters had annoyed me. I thought of them as whiners for the sake of whining and now I was adding my personal touch to their fruity little painting. I was planting my tree in their forest. Who knew?

Walking out on a walk-out is a pretty miserable experience - I wouldn't recommend it. They turned out to be more lenient than I had imagined. The only thing I heard as I walked away was, "You're scaring them away, dude," which I assume was addressed to the red-bearded fellow. Yeah, I left, but it wasn't out of fear of anything other than failing a paper that I had worked my butt off on.

Now let's jump to last night. I'm in a senior seminar class for film where our one project for the entire semester is to film a documentary on something. My group chose this odd place in Wilmington that all of us had been to a few times, but none of us really understood. It's a hookah bar (hookahs are the weird pipes that the caterpillar smoked in Alice in Wonderland) on Castle street. The place is, quite literally, nuts. There are fire-eaters, poets, comedians, dancers, any just about anyone else you might imagine. The decor is all homemade art and found furniture that has been redecorated to suit their purposes. They serve food, but until yesterday I had never tried it, (I recommend "The Beast" grilled pita, because it's delicious). The people who work there are varied and interesting. They sometimes wear funky hats, always wear funky cloths and they all have nicknames that sound like comic book villains. One day the manager was wearing a confederate civil war jacket - now that's what I call projecting an effective middle-management image. When you first come into that place, if you're like me, you wonder how long you're going to last with the weirdoes in there. In the process of making this film, however, I've found them to be some of the coolest and nicest people I've met in Wilmington. They're all about the arts and it seems like one of their biggest missions is to give an outlet to anyone who does anything, and I do mean ANYTHING. While we were interviewing the owners we caught wind of a bellydancing showcase that was going to happen, and thats why we showed up last night with our camera.

We got the equipment set up and, little by little, the tiny cafe filled to capacity. Old people, young people, people in polos and people in purple sport coats with berets. In my comfortable little Bible-belt life, I've scarcely been exposed to such diversity, and certainly not all in one place. Techno middle-eastern music blasted through the place, filling it with a type of energy you almost have to feel to understand. The only light in the whole place came from dim can lights at the front and decorative hanging lamps the were almost randomly scattered throughout the bar area. I watched from my high up perch on a homemade seating platforms as the shadowy mass of a group of marines melded into a mass of middle-aged hipsters behind them, which melded into the rest of the crowd seamlessly. It was really strangely beautiful.

The belly dancers came out one by one, each performing to their own song and clothed in traditional belly dance garb. It was pretty amazing to watch. One of the owners was dancing and she balanced a saber on her head while spinning around, tell me that isn't impressive. My favorite part was when they introduced the live middle-eastern drum team and let them go crazy until the dancers came out with finger symbols. You can't even begin to imagine how cool it sounded and looked. They finished their set, we took down our equipment, and off we went.

On the way home I kept thinking about how I felt about the place the first time I came there. It's curiously located away from downtown in the middle of a low-rent, mostly African-American neighborhood. As a middle-class white kid from the whitest school in the southeast, I was a bit shook up about going there. I imagined all sorts of scenarios involving guns and dead comic book villains and stolen hookahs. I remember thinking the place looked dirty and poorly put together. Of course, the biggest thing I remember was thinking about how much I didn't fit in - how this was a place for the strange and outcast and I traveled through it like a preppy tourist at a freak-show theme park. Soon I could tell all of my preppy friends about it and sound cultured and cool. I don't belong here - really? Then, where do I belong?

Well, from what I've been taught I must belong in a white, middle-class neighborhood about 4 blocks from the school and 2 blocks from the church. I should have 2.5 kids and eat breakfast with them before I head out to work. My wife will take them to school in the SUV and before she comes back home to her interior decorating business and I work a 9-5 to pay the bills. We all put in our time where its needed in a safe and productive and comfortable manner. This includes God, you know. We put in our time with God like we put in our time at the office. An hour on Sunday, and hour and a half on Wednesday, maybe another hour at small group and, what the heck, throw in 30 minutes of "quiet time" each day. This makes a well-balanced life of ... well, it makes a well balanced life of mediocrity.

Do we really believe that Christ called us to be comfortable and safe in our suburban holes? I know this isn't a new idea to any of you that have been in Church or gone on fabulous campus ministry retreats at camps. This is something that we talk about but that we so rarely take the opportunities to experience. Not even our mission trips really provide up with a opportunity to broaden our horizons much because we make them trips, not lifestyles. There is spiritual warfare out there - in our towns - and we should be in the middle of it, fighting for the cause of Christ. We have an obligation to love and serve everyone, everywhere, regardless of our comfort level in their presence. Truth be told, I feel more comfortable stretching my horizons with new people than sitting in my apartment with CCF buddies because if I sit stagnant long enough, I feel useless.

I thought about this and how the people I've been with this week are the so-called "enemies of the gospel." The hippies that fight for free love and dirty drugs and life experience and the freaks of the gutters, the people who band together in certain spots to feel that they fit in with someone. These aren't our enemies. Their lifestyles can't do anything to us that we don't let them do. These are our friends that we've been neglecting. Even if we never get the chance to have that amazing spiritual dialogue that could prove life-altering, these are the people that Jesus talked about being there for. The people we're supposed to listen to and understand and love - the people that we've been told for so long are our enemies.

When I think about how I would have missed that belly dancing show, I get pretty sad. I don't get sad because the show was awesome (even though it was) but what really sucks is the reason I would have missed it. If I hadn't had that project I would have had plenty of reasons for dismissing it and missed out on that beautiful little nugget of life and on meeting those people because of my fear and discomfort with the area. I still have a long way to go because the Juggling Gypsy and the tree people are both tame compared to the worlds real challenges, but I hope this is a start for me in the right direction that keeps on rolling.

So that was my week. Pretty productive and pretty fun. Next week I'm going to DC!