Riding and Ranting and Saving the World

Handlebar to handlebar with my friends, biking across the country roads of northeast Georgia, I’ve been privy to some great conversations. Politics. Affairs of the heart. Economics. Civil and human rights. Geology. Nutrition. Ecology. Infrastructure financing. Birth control. All of these topics and more we’ve dissected over hill and vale, letting the conversation lull as we head up big hills so we can keep breathing, then picking it up again as the road flattens out. There’s something so wonderfully personal-yet-not-personal about talking while riding. Perhaps it’s that we’re not making direct eye contact – too busy watching the road, yet we’re still shoulder to shoulder. Perhaps it’s the inherent trust in riding with a group – at the speed and proximity with which we ride, we’re all putting our skin and bones (if not our lives) in each others’ hands. Whatever it is, these conversations have kept me going when I’ve been tired, energized me to take one more hill, and most of all, enlightened, encouraged and inspired me to keep reaching outside of myself – something of which I’ve often considered myself incapable.


Recently, the conversation started with nutrition and ended with world-changing, rather seamlessly, too, I might add. Can you get enough protein as a vegetarian? How about as a vegan? Are frequent questions the omnivores ask. So frequently that we’ve begun to snicker at it, since we all know how much protein beans, grains, nuts, seeds (and for the vegetarians, dairy and eggs) and the dark leafy greens carry into our diets each day. Beyond nutrition, though, the politics of food is every bit as hotly debated. You’re not saving any chickens by not eating them. Your rage against the corporate farm machine isn’t going to change it. It’s too big. It’s too ingrained. You just sound like a weirdo hippie freak when you talk about the moral obligation of the middle and upper classes to buy eggs from cage-free hens. Perhaps. OK. In fact. Many of those statements sound TRUE. Especially the weirdo hippie freak one, so I try to keep that one to myself at least sometimes.

But are we powerless? Can we really only rage against it without ever affecting it? We are NOT, even if the “only” power we have right now is our grocery money, we told each other. We decided, on a lovely rolling hill just before the biggest, steepest incline of the whole ride (soulsucking, we say) that our few dollars spent at Athens Locally Grown and farmers’ markets, rather than at a corporately-owned grocery store DO make a difference and that our speaking up, even in our polite-well-bred-southern-women way (“perhaps in the future you might consider a vegan option?” is hardly a revolutionary statement, no?) are small weapons, to be sure, but weapons nonetheless. What was that about David’s slingshot when the entire well-armed infantry was willing to bag it?

But still, a pervasive hopelessness crept in. Yes. I will choose for me and my family, but how does that affect change? Real change? Watch from the corners of your eyes, says Anne LaMott. Don’t look at the problem head on, but be aware of what’s going on on the sidelines, because, there, so often, is where the answers lie. And today, the answer (an answer – we need way more than one) lay not just on the sideline, but in the pages of a children’s book - The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. In summary, Milo and his pals are trying to save the world. Milo is ten, so it’s a tall order. At the story’s climax, the demons of the Land of Ignorance are hot on his trail:

…pounding down the mountainside…came all the loathsome creatures who choose to live in Ignorance…most terrifying of all, directly behind, inching along like giant soft-shelled snails, with blazing eyes and wet anxious mouths, came the Gorgons of Hate and Malice, leaving a trail of slime and moving much more quickly than you’d think…(skipping over great and hilarious descriptions of the demons of Compromise, Gross Exaggeration, Threadbare Excuse, and my personal favorite, Overbearing Know It All)…And down came the demons from everywhere, frenzied creatures of darkness, lurching wildly toward their prey…Closer and closer the demons loomed as the desperate chase neared its end. Then, gathering themselves for one final leap…they rose as one and-

And suddenly stopped, as if frozen in mid-air, unable to move, staring ahead in terror…there in the horizon, for as far as the eye could see, stood the massed armies of Wisdom…There in the lead was King Azaz, his dazzling armor embossed with every letter of the alphabet, and, with him, the Mathemagician, brandishing a freshly sharpened staff (it’s a pencil)…Everyone Milo had met during his journey had come to help-the men of the marketplace, the miners of Digitopolis, and all the good people from the valley and the forest…

Cringing with fear, the monsters of Ignorance turned in flight and…returned to the damp, dark places from which they came.

Delusions of grandeur to compare myself to Milo? Perhaps. But you will note that HE is not whacking off the demons’ heads – he’s running from them as fast as his ten-year-old legs will carry him. It’s the amassed Wisdom that he’s met along the way that is able to stand its ground against Ignorance. Believe me; I do plenty of running away from Ignorance. Give myself over, not to absolute pleasure, a la The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but to complacency and the status quo. To the sense that I can’t make a difference. But. Oh, but. Why is the boy David creeping round my brain again?

Now, I'm not saying that meat-eating and grocery-store shopping is Ignorance and there's certainly more to Wisdom than local produce and eggs. This passage by Norton Juster brought me to tears (you've really got to read the whole thing) because it's about faith, and tenacity, and not knowing when to quit, and keeping after something even when you're tired and scared. About believing in something good, and doing what you can to make that something REAL, even if you're just one ten year old boy (or a 48 year old woman).

The wisdom of us all, the collective good of us all - the caring, wonderful, smart, thoughtful, concerned people I’ve met and grown to love here in Athens and afar – WE can make a difference. We DO make a difference. It feels so small most days. Like Milo, I am so frightened by the ever-louder sounds of Ignorance all around us, and like Milo, I’m soothed by the bright Wisdom that will always be our rescue.

So I’ll take my advice from Tom Petty tonight:

Gonna stand my ground, won’t be turned around

Gonna keep this world from draggin’ me down

Gonna stand my ground

And I won’t back down

And if I sound like a weirdo hippie freak when I talk about morals, economics and chickens in the same breath, well, BFD. Hippie freak I am.