Always Selling
Another day in North Carolina. I cannot escape the memories that attend a visit to the Durham area. I grew up in Bragtown just off of Roxboro Road a few minutes from this Holiday Inn.
We walked down main street last night and marveled at the massive transformation underway in the old downtown area. From a distance you can see the construction cranes that dot the skyline. Main street is a restaurant, entertainment, 21st Century business district with
distinct ties to Duke University, which is a few minutes away. During our walk we visited the 21C gallery Hotel in the old Hill Building. The art deco Hill Building which once housed the Central Carolina Bank and Trust now is a repository of another kind. The 21C Hotel gallery of modern art houses work which courageously offers criticism of our 21st Century ways of life. What a sea change from the Durham that I remember of the 1950s. No institution of this sort could have been found in the center of town in that day.
This visit to my hometown came with the news that Billy Graham has passed away. He lived in Montreat N.C. for the last years of his life. You may know who he was. He was the first among many American evangelists of the last century. The idea is that that by responding to
a simple proposition that one has failed in life, and by “turning one’s life over” to Jesus, the problem is solved. As a kid I remember listening to Billy Graham preach on The Hour of Decision radio broadcast. As a young adult I remember working as a counselor at one of his mass rallies, or Crusades as they were called. It seems all so surreal now. Who hasn’t experienced failure, disappointment in life? I doubt if I’ve ever known a person whose quotient of regret, has not outweighed their sense of joy and fulfillment. To think that a simple formulaic prayer of dedication would fix the problem, seems outlandish, even superstitious to me at this point. At the time it wasn’t a hard sell. I wish it were true.
Perhaps we would not have spent years of bloody conflict in Vietnam, unable to see anything else but our role as a global super power. Faith in Jesus did nothing to stop the burning of Vietnamese villages or poisoning the jungles. That war led to the next, and to the next. We are still at war at an unpayable human and financial cost.
Years later our super-power status is definitely fading. Despite the work of M. L. King in my generation we are drifting farther away from a society based upon the intrinsic value of every human being. We are becoming more racist, more ethnocentric, more America-First-nationalistic, anti-immigrant. Our insecurities, anxieties are fanned by the Republican Party now in power. We’ve never had a President who is as incessantly, promotion minded. Like a side-show barker, he is always exhorting us to just believe his simple message. Perhaps it’s endemic to American culture to seek a salesman to pitch a easy work-around to self knowledge and responsibility.
A friend of mine, Don responded in an email exchange that it does not appear that human consciousness has a meaningful role in learning, that there is no feedback loop, —that we do not learn anything from experience. I am not yet willing to concede his point, but sadly enough, he may be right.