January 2011

I was a pupil in Miss Henley’s sixth-grade class in the Gorham Elementary School when history touched me. Gorham is and was a village located on the Missouri Pacific Railroad about fifty miles northwest of Cairo, Illinois. A substantial share of its five hundred residents were employees of that railroad.

The place hasn’t changed much since March 18, 1925—the day the most lethal tornado in recorded history came roaring across the Mississippi River from Missouri and devastated Gorham, the first town it hit in Illinois.

It is now more than half a century since a group of us Morehouse College students traveled to Hartford, Connecticut, from Atlanta, Georgia, in 1942 to spend the summer working on the Cullman Brothers Tobacco Farms. I was the student leader for this chartered bus trip, which took us through eastern Georgia, South and North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, D.C., Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and finally into Connecticut.

I was born and reared in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The summers of 1938 and 1939 I worked with my uncles Harden and Hampton Carter in their small trucking business in St. Louis, Missouri. After finishing high school in 1940, I had gone to Los Angeles for seven months and across the country to Buffalo, New York, for another four months before entering Morehouse in September 1941. The trip to Connecticut was for some reason very different for me. I had never seen or realized the depth of racial discrimination in our land as I did on this trip.

In October of 1964, I lived in Beirut, Lebanon. That was when Beirut was glorious, when its tiered apartment houses and office buildings stood unharmed beyond the white sands of the beaches; when the sky, and the mountains in the distance, and the Mediterranean close up formed peaceful layers of blue. It was Beirut when carefree families strolled on Sunday afternoons along the Corniche.

In 1964 I lived in the junior-senior girls’ dorm at the American University—Bustani Hall, a pebbled-concrete building cradled halfway up the bluffs of the campus, hidden from the beach road by the thick trees and bushes that tumbled down the hillsides to meet the seashore. I lived in a sunny room on the third floor, with Rowda, a cheerful, young Sudanese woman of medium height with happy eyes, who mothered me unrelentingly and called me “Sukr” instead of my name— Sukr , Arabic for “sugar,” because I was white.

During March 1995 Sun Line’s Stella Solaris will be departing Galveston for the Yucatán and parts south (800-872-6400). This time the special equinox cruise has been expanded to include sites in Honduras and Guatemala. Other cruise lines, such as Regency Cruises (212-972-4499) and OdessAmerica (800-221-3254) (interestingly, a Ukrainian line), offer similar trips. When you select a particular cruise, keep in mind that most shore excursions into Maya country involve long bus rides and even travel by plane, and as enticing as they all appear, two twelve-hour jaunts back to back might be one too many.

In the last year or so, the Maya,both present-day population and ancient civilization, have gained a new kind of attention in the popular imagination and in the press. “Secrets of the Maya,” a Time magazine cover story of August 9, 1993, sought lessons for today’s world in the Mayas’ centuries of spectacular achievements and sudden decline about 900 years ago. Recently, a five-nation effort called El Mundo Maya was set up to lure travelers to the hundreds of archeological sites that still give powerful evidence of the great heights Maya civilization reached while most of Europe slumbered. “The history of the American continent does not begin with Christopher Columbus or even with Leif the Lucky,” writes the Yale anthropologist Michael Coe, “but with those Maya scribes in the Central American jungles who first began to record the deeds of their rulers some 2000 years ago.”

In the immediate aftermath of last November’s election, I was overtaken by a kind of awe as I contemplated this month’s column. “Clearly,” said an inner voice, “this is a historic event. Say something of historical consequence! Illuminate the moment; plant a signpost on the road ahead.”

Well, I can’t quite. The changes in our political culture since 1950 have so rewritten the rules of the game that comparisons with the past are cursed from the opening sentence with the apples-and-oranges taint. Besides, most of the juicy and obvious points were made in the daily press the morning after.

If you want to know how much the world can change—and stay the same—in half a lifetime, consider the United States Defense Department, the General Motors Corporation, and the man who, 40 years ago, epitomized them both, Charles E. Wilson.

In 1955, the Defense Department ran by far the most powerful military operation in the world. But that power came at a fearful cost to the American taxpayer. The Pentagon consumed nearly 60 percent of the federal budget and one dollar out of every eight of gross national product. Today, the Pentagon still commands unparalleled military power, but defense is only 20 percent of the budget and consumes one dollar of every twenty of GNP.

General Motors, meanwhile, was America’s largest industrial corporation. It dominated the American business with a market share of almost 50 percent and therefore dominated American business. Moreover, it was the very model of how a vast economic enterprise should be run.

The newspaperman Noah Brooks knew Abraham Lincoln well before he became president and grew so close to him during his time in Washington that he was being considered as a replacement for one of the president’s secretaries at the time of the assassination. Afterward, he wrote a book about the Lincoln White House and a biography of Lincoln for young people. But, as the years went by, even he was astonished by the super-abundance of books and pamphlets and articles about his old friend. “It is questionable,” he wrote near the turn of the century, “if material relating to the human existence of any person has ever been so thoroughly explored, sifted, and analyzed as the material relating to the humble birth and obscure youth and manhood of Abraham Lincoln has been. What rummaging! What minute scrutiny! What indefatigable questioning of every person who had the slightest acquaintance with Lincoln, his friends and his neighbors! . . . There can be no new ‘Lincoln stories.’ . . . The stories are all told . . . for the most part the mental figure of Lincoln, as it will appear to future generations of men, has already begun to take permanent shape.”

I am surprised that Dr. Ronald Numbers thought that Moses wrote the book of Genesis in English. He said, “After all, if you were an advocate of the day-age theory, you had to assume that when Moses wrote of days, he meant ages. Why didn’t he simply say ages?” I assumed that we all knew that Moses wrote in Hebrew. He did not say day , he said yom . This word is also translated as: age, time, today, forever, continually, year, season, as well as day. It is apparent that no one is able to tell from the word day ( yom ) itself how long Moses intended to say each period was.

I read your article “The New Creationists” (November) with sadness.

I am not competent to comment on whether or not “scientific creationism” is good or bad science. But as a pastor who has just begun his forty-eighth year of serving congregations as their minister, I can testify that these notions are bad biblical interpretation.

Ask yourself this question: Is the Bible a book about botany, quantum physics, geology, anthropology, chemistry, or calculus? Of course not.

The theme of the Bible is man’s relationship to his Creator/Creation and his neighbor. It exposes rebellion, selfishness, greed—in short, sin—and the need for repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, in all aspects of personal, social, and international life.

Would that our society would spend less time on nonsense and more time on qualities essential to our very survival.