LikeTheDew.com

He was walking along the street, minding his own business. Out of nowhere, he was attacked, stabbed over and over again with such force that the coroner said the wounds went all the way through his body. His body. Lying there, in a rapidly expanding pool of his own blood. He was dying, and he knew it. He didn’t know why, only that the life was flowing out of him onto the solid, gray concrete of an English street.

In 1916 the Argent Lumber Company commenced work in the South Carolina Lowcountry. Beginning in 1904 several whaling and sealing operations commenced along the northern shore of South Georgia Island in the far South Atlantic Ocean.

Argent was one of a number of similar lumber companies that operated in South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia beginning in the 1880′s. The various whaling operations began on South Georgia somewhat later, the first and most successful being the Argentine Fishing Company (Compañía Argentina de Pesca).

A few years back, Columbia public relations guru Bud Ferillo made a film about several economically distressed counties that he dubbed the “Corridor of Shame.” This area, which stretched along Interstate 95 in South Carolina from Dillon County to Jasper County, got a lot of attention when then-presidential candidate Barack Obama toured an old Dillon middle school in the run-up to the 2008 election. But did you ever wonder whether South Carolina’s Corridor of Shame was an anomaly — or whether something similar was happening on the other sides of our state borders?

Or rather, helped build. Partially.

Last week I attended a straw bale house building workshop in West Virginia. The workshop was hosted by Andrew Morrison of StrawBale.com, who runs similar workshops all over the world where one can go and assist with the building of a bale house and learn all about it to go home and build one’s own.

Anything characterized by high energy, originality, humor and intelligence is bound to get my attention. I was at an annual fund-raising party for an alternative art center called Nexus in about 1986. Touring the studios I kept being distracted from the visual art by some very interesting Rock ‘n Roll. I wasn’t the only one. A large segment of the crowd was gathered around the Swimming Pool Qs in the courtyard. Once in their vicinity I was there for as long as they would play.

When I sat in that old church built in the Gothic style surrounded by the music that the organist was playing, I was thankful to be in such a peaceful setting, far away in body and spirit from the violence that holds so many lives hostage in this world of cruelty and tumult.

In a church where people pray for peace, forgiveness and love–all of which seem so lacking in our world–I wonder at times how we manage to reconcile what we wish the world were like and how it actually is. Sitting there in such a calm and safe spot, the lyrics of “Over the Rainbow,” a make-believe place where there are no troubles…

As it says in my by-line, in the several items I’ve posted previously on “Like the Dew,” I recently ran for Congress. But I am not a politician, nor possessed of a personal ambition to hold public office. I ran, rather, because for the past nine years I have had a message that I regard as so urgent that I’ve been willing to do whatever I can to spread it far and wide in order to persuade my fellow citizens of its truth and importance.