I was sitting in my car outside the grocery store last Monday listening to NPR when I heard a profile on the small town of Blakely, Georgia. Blakely has been at the center of concerns surrounding a salmonella outbreak from a factory in Blakely responsible for preparing peanut butter, paste, and other products. All Things Considered decided to interview the mayor of the small south Georgia town, Ric Hall. You can sense in the interview a palpable dissonance between rural America and Michele Norris' urban radio studio, particularly when she asks if the peanut features prominently in signs and public displays.
When Mayor Hall responds that there is, in fact, a peanut monument just outside of City Hall, it seems laughable--like something that would be noted in a travelogue of bizarre American landmarks. As I listened closer though, I realized that though I am every bit Georgian, I, too, was missing something in my dismissal of this lament from the rural South. Mayor Hall explains that the peanut was the crop that saved most of South Georgia. When the
boll weevil was devastating cotton crops from Texas to South Carolina in the first half of the last century, the peanut became the saving grace of over half the agriculture of the South. So much so, that it merited a monument on the town square--a testament to the ingenuity of a people willing to diversify in the face of immense crisis.
The wonders of Wikipedia yield a comparable statue in Enterprise, Alabama. There, a statue stands large and Romanesque, as an everlasting witness to the boll weevil himself. Instead of building a monument to the cure, Enterprise celebrated the cause of the disease, because it forced farmers to diversify crops and, in so doing, brought tremendous agricultural prosperity to the city.
In Blakely the Peanut Corporation of America was shutting down, laying off the 50 or so workers who based their livelihood on the plant. Last week alone, over 100,000 men and women across America met similar fates. In the midst of recession, burgeoning unemployment and a shrinking GDP, the question might rightly be "What will our next monuments be built to?" Or, as the statue of Enterprise might suggest "Where will our ingenuity take us next?"
The sin of our times is believing that we've gone beyond repair--that things are so dire that they simply cannot be reconciled. The cotton crops in Alabama and South Georgia had weathered slavery, indentured servitude, sharecroppers, and finally industrialization. Still, a tiny non-native insect managed to destroy the livelihood of a few million Americans--but it didn't. Not only that, but the human spirit was such that it could recognize a plague of biblical proportions as a blessing--something to shake us out of our comfortability and force us to find ways to spur on creativity and innovation.
I don't know what the next monument in Blakely will be--it might be an automotive assembly robot, a wind turbine for renewable energy, or maybe a silicon chip to some aspect of technology. There is a great deal of attention being paid to the crisis of our time, and monuments remind us that this is neither the first nor the last time we have encountered such hardships.
What we have seen in the greed and excess of our times exposes the shadow side of our ingenuity. The creative capacity God has given to humanity for the building up of the Beloved Community has been relegated to pursuing our own vices and comforts with no regard for neighbor. There is an American tendency to perceive this as a quest for the common good but we know it as the basic commerce policy of the Kingdom of God.
As we lose jobs and look for answers, watch 401(k)s crash and markets tumble, may we continue to build the Kingdom in intangible ways.
May our innovation lead to actions of sacred peace.
May our drive be directed only toward that which is good for the many, and not just the one.
May we embrace this crisis and erect monuments to it.
May it remind us that we are more than what we produce
that million dollar office renovations yield nothing to the Kingdom of God,
that we follow a Savior who had no place to lay his head
that the Kingdom comes not in earthen structures but in earthen vessels committed to a new vision of what humanity can be
that, in the midst of all manner of strife and chaos, we cannot help but hope.
