I’ve got a photograph in one of my drawers at home of my great-grandfather and great-grandmother. It’s one of those ancient ones, printed on glass—I believe they are called daguerreotypes. It shows a stern-faced man with mutton-chop sideburns sitting next to a mousy lady in a bonnet. Her name was Molly, and his was Robert Ezekiel Lester. She was the daughter of a plantation owner who was killed, say the records, by “a drunken overseer” at her home near Thomaston, Georgia. He was the eldest of six brothers, and the owner of a turpentine plantation that straddled the Georgia-Florida state line and had over eighty miles of roads.
I don’t know much about Robert Ezekiel as a person, except that he was reported to be a gentleman and a churchgoer, a graduate of the University in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. During the Civil War he was an officer, adjutant to the Florida cavalry, keeping the Yankees from landing on the Gulf coast and flanking General Lee’s army. He may have been a nice man, a family man, a Christian man. But what I have never been able to get past was one simple fact: he owned over sixty slaves.
That fact didn’t somehow seem so strange when I was growing up. To be honest, I never had occasion to wonder much about it until my mother’s maid, Carrie, gave me an insight. This was well before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when Southerners could still cling on to their desperate dream of racial superiority. Carrie had always been in my house, Monday to Friday, a slight, dark figure with sinus problems who smelled like laundry starch. One day I was waving a Confederate flag—we had been playing Yankees and Rebels all afternoon in the woods. She snorted at me. “What you doing with that redneck rag?” she said.
That was the first glimpse of truth I had ever had about the South. It ended when my mother came home, because Carrie just clammed up. But that afternoon she told me things that were nothing less than radioactive in my ten-year-old head, ending with the statement: “People can’t own people.”
When the civil rights movement started hotting up in the sixties, it split my family down the middle. Carrie was still there, but she had become a kind of subversive element. My father lowered his voice when talking about race, which it seemed was all anybody talked about at the time. My family, who considered themselves “genteel”, started using the ugly epithets formerly only employed by “white trash.” I was on the other side, a traitor to my history, marching in demonstrations and singing “We Shall Overcome” in the shower to madden my mother. It was a good time and a bad time. That was some kind of watershed of consciousness, in which an insight that now seems perfectly natural burst upon us like a sunbeam. It was so simple as to be absurd, yet so divisive as to destroy families like mine. Carrie said it better than anybody: “People can’t own people.”
Cultural insights rarely come in bolts of inspiration. They tend to happen more slowly, until a “tipping point” is reached. Wile E. Coyote walks off the edge of a cliff in pursuit of the Road Runner, and doesn’t fall until he looks down. We move beyond the age of slavery, of apartheid, of carbon dumping into the atmosphere, and never notice it until gravity exerts its pull. But maybe as we mature, such insights can evolve through the use of imagination.
I’d like to jump in an imaginary time machine and go back and have a conversation with Robert Ezekiel Lester. Sit on the front porch of Horseshoe Plantation and sip a mint julep and listen to the cicadas. I’d like to see if I could make the obvious insight of my youth work for him. I’d like to try Carrie’s question on him, the one about people owning people. I would be very persuasive and logical. He would probably run me through with his cavalry sword. It would be an exercise in futility, of course, because Robert Ezekiel was a man of his times, locked into a worldview as pervasive as the air he breathed. He must really have believed that Africans were simple and childlike, needing discipline and restraint just like a plough horse.
But I think we can learn from him. I think we can use his honourable and ignorant certainty to examine our own life and times. We must be equally locked into ideas that will seem absurd and primitive to a visitor from the future. So let’s try something. Let’s imagine ourselves sitting on the equivalent of the front porch—enmeshed in our own cultural web-- and suddenly being confronted with a great-grandchild yet unborn. The great-grandchild would begin:
Child: Grandpa, don’t you know what you are doing to the earth, burning petrol and coal and ruining the CO2 balance in the atmosphere?
Grandpa: (sighing) Yes, I suppose, but there is no alternative. Better to hope that the future scientists will sort things out.
Child: Not so far, they haven’t. But what about burying nuclear waste—surely you know that people like me have got to live with that threat.
Grandpa: It seemed like a good idea at the time.
Child: Is it true that you keep animals in cages, feed them amphetamines and a continual diet of antibiotics and ship them alive over huge distances in crowded trucks?
Grandpa: Market forces determine our priorities. Anyway, animals don’t feel pain the way we do. Can we change the subject?
Child: Er...Do you really eat their bodies?
Grandpa: What, don’t you like bacon butties? Don’t you still have McDonald’s?
Child: What about all those people in Africa, starving and fighting each other over lack of resources? Do you really have so much that you have to pay farmers not to grow food?
Grandpa: Market forces; haven’t you been listening?
Child: And I’ve heard that there is something called the World Bank, that makes every country organise their economies in the same way. They make places like Belize and Bangladesh go through “austerity programs” to enhance competition and make their economies “viable” in international trade.
Grandpa: Competition makes everything better. We just happen to be winners.
Child: But you wrote the rules.
Grandpa: (Sighs) Isn’t there someplace you have to be? Coronation Street is coming on now.

Yes, it’s true. Each succeeding generation has insights that make absurdities of the one before. This would be more amusing if we didn’t have the imagination to actually see it like it is. Knowing that things are badly out of kilter and doing nothing about it has to be worse than being ignorant. Because we have an advantage that Robert Ezekiel didn’t: our view of history and our access to the actual world is a whole lot clearer. He may have slept peacefully until the Yankees came and disturbed his dream, but we don’t have that luxury anymore. Blessing or curse, like it or not, it’s our move. We have to bring it home.
When I was working overseas during the eighties, it was quite acceptable to refer to something known as the “Third World.” This phrase was coined to cover all those people who, by reasons of lack of resources, capital or educational advantage, lived in poor countries. The first world was, of course, our European and North American societies, throwing in Japan as a kind of honorary member. The second world was all those benighted socialist countries with state-controlled economies, who built sub-standard automobiles and only did well in the Olympics. Everybody else—India, the ancient mother of religion, Egypt, where pyramids were built before our great-granddaddies crawled out of their mud huts, Persia, the ancient pinnacle of poetry and art—all these were the Third World.
When I went out to Botswana in 1982, even though I was as politically correct in my theory as it was possible to be, I must have carried with me something of this “first, second, third” model. It’s much like the prizes in a contest, isn’t it? The idea, however well we wrapped it in kind euphemisms, was that we, the lucky chosen few, would convey our wisdom to the unenlightened.
There’s nothing like a good steeping for six or seven years in your own ignorance to make you see sense. Even as wrapped up in anodyne rhetoric as I was, it didn’t take all that long to realise that that we weren’t smarter than anybody—only richer. We weren’t supposed to listen to people’s naïve comments about what they needed, because, when asked, they always said the same thing: “money.” We were supposed to discover ways they could stop suffering so much from things like childhood death from diarrhoea, by getting them to dig wells under our supervision. We were supposed to stop them degrading the environment through cutting down trees, which hurt our atmosphere too, and teach them to make houses out of clay and sand. This was called “appropriate technology.” The words stick in my throat today—who decides what is “appropriate?”
If you live in Botswana or Kenya or Latin America for a while, it doesn’t take long before you realise that the people from there are not just charming natives. They’re just like you. They get ulcers, high blood pressure, breast cancer. They love their babies. They work very hard. They know all about banks and insurance policies. They write books and paint pictures. To answer the question posed by Fritz Schumacher’s subtitle to Small Is Beautiful: “Yes, they matter.”
Driven by “market forces” – what a phrase! — onto bare, arid land and steep hillsides, these people accepted us. We were a cadre of international idealists sent to put plasters on arterial wounds. They could make do, become beautiful-- not sore-- losers in the game we invented. They could stop worrying us with their sad wasted bodies on news programmes, and maybe they’d stop all this inconvenient fighting and just settle down to being third place forever.
That’s why I’d really like to get rid of this phrase-- the “third world.” Don’t we really know that there is only one world? If we can’t imagine it, then we should have a holiday in Gambia or Goa, and if we’re not too venal or too stupid, we’ll realise it. Then maybe, when we come home, we’ll stop calling people “foreigners.” We’ll stop moaning that the immigrants are getting our council houses, and we won’t wonder why poverty and loss of self esteem sends Palestinian children out into the streets to face Israeli tanks. We don’t need a visit from a future grandchild to tell us these things, we already really know them, and so that makes our responsibility very clear.
I learned a long time ago, in ministry training, that you don’t harangue people about something without offering them some way to deal with it. And, besides, I’m not really speaking to you at all—but to myself. So here goes: Do you want to help the poor? Yes, it’s okay to give money to Oxfam and other agencies—they do what they can with a bad situation. Do you want to demonstrate that the earth and people matter? We know what to do: pollute less, want less, spend less. Get out of investments that rob other people of their chances, no matter how profitable they may be. Yes, I mean Shell and Nestle and the others—you can get a list from our denominational headquarters if you want. And you can have a good look at your own hidden investments, made through insurance companies and insurance funds. Jump on your government with both feet, and keep on jumping until they change the rules. Swallow your spit and imitate Bono and Bob Geldof, if you have to. Yes, visit the poor places with their wonderful climates and interesting customs, but walk lightly as you do so that you won’t just make things worse.
All that is just common sense. But what we’ve really got to do has less to do with practical remedies than with attitudes. What we’ve really got to do is change our minds. The Greeks had a word for it—metanoia, a change of heart. Stop thinking in old patterns. Stop making the world a three-part ghetto—that’s just keeping us on the front porch with old Robert Ezekiel. Throttle our nationalistic and patriotic sentiments and stomp on our racial clichés. Get our heads around one simple fact: we are all one, and we are all in this together. Winners and losers together. Their loss isn’t really our gain, you know; it just seems that way. The Golden Rule turns out to be good common sense as well as the right thing to do. And Jesus saying, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” is more than a goody-goody prescription; it’s a blueprint for survival. Love your neighbour because he or she is you.
Where we will get the inspiration for that, God—literally-- knows. But I no longer believe that a change of heart is optional. Because unless we start understanding how temporary our dream of superiority and separation really is, we will all lose. It’s time to stop putting people “over there”. It’s time to bring them home, bring all of us home-- not to Robert Ezekiel’s front porch-- but to the one world we all really live in.

Art Lester
21st August 2005 Dublin Unitarian Church