We’ve taken a few days off to explore Georgia’s Barrier Islands. In contrast to Florida’s Gold Coast, these are more past than current playgrounds of the super wealthy.  North of St. Augustine, we have also encountered more of the everyday south – commerce, military, industry, and southern accents.

Our final weekend in Florida was Jacksonville, which was an experience quite different from everything we had encountered thus far. Our generous hosts, Mike and Linda Plummer, treated us to a great dinner with a group of UUs with whom we have a special affinity.  In addition to an appreciation of Earth Charter values, UU principles, and all those good things, these folks have a passion for bicycling!  Ed Napier, the most adventuresome fellow at the party, even proved to a seasoned hiker, better acquainted than we are with the Olympic Mountains of Washington State.  Unlike previous evenings, the conversation was not devoted to politics.  For an hour or two we even managed to forget there was a war going on while we exchanged stories of adventure and the beauty of Mother Earth.

On Sunday morning at the UU church of Jacksonville we presented our views on Earth Charter and global democracy to a sharp, spirited group of UUs who meet every week for a discussion forum. Here is a basic question that evokes many fears: “What is this global democracy really going to look like?” One man suggested that it could be mob rule. Others are fearful that democracy would be just a veneer, with powerful economic and military interests pulling the strings.  Our task as global citizens is to help create this democracy in a way that prevents these extremes.

Our answer is that global democracy must be done through an international process that deals forthrightly with legitimate fears.  It must proceed to lay the foundations step by step, not all at once, so that corrections can be made when problems develop. Every new treaty, every new international organization or endeavor, is such a step. But when taking the big step of initiating a world parliament, then the many experiments world wide in “deep democracy” must also be considered. To us, this means more informed and deliberative ways of connecting citizens to government.  Three examples are the citizen jury to evaluate proposals, local assemblies to prioritize budgets, and voting based on the ranking alternatives.

We were surprised to find pro-war sentiment even among some Jacksonville UUs.  One woman said, “I hope there is some wisdom to this war”.  Mona was left tongue-tied by that statement because her natural response would have been, “Wisdom is to investigate the facts and the history and what officials say off-the-record, not to believe what Bush says in public”. But that comment would have been insensitive in view of the fact that her son is a helicopter pilot in the war.

Jacksonville seemed to be our stepping off place from Florida to the real deep south.  Although our “bike truck”, as Mona calls it, is always a great conversation piece, business has really boomed here.  Perhaps we have neglected to describe our “big rig”. We are traveling on a sleek blue Bike Friday travel tandem, pulling a suit-case trailer with a backpack on top (the entire bike disassembles into the suit case for air travel, a fact which always astounds).  Our “Bike for Global Democracy” banner is draped over the load.

Virtually everyone stops to ask where we are going and what we’re about.  This gives us plenty of opportunity to hand out brochures and talk about the Earth Charter and global democracy.  This occurs most often in front of small town food stores.  That’s where we meet and talk with a representative sampling of the population.  We have found ordinary working people to be very receptive to our ideas.  Some are so eager to talk with us that it’s sometimes hard to get away and resume our slow northerly progress.

Mona was especially pleased with the responses of people she spoke with at her book signing in B. Dalton’s at a Jacksonville mall.  A frequent response was, “Oh, it’s about peace! That’s what we need right now!”  She had a sense that many were not well educated – poor people who sacrificed to buy Alien Child for $12.95.

Upon crossing the border from Florida into Georgia this week, we noted a couple of changes.  We passed through several small towns that were apparently a lot poorer than we had visited in Florida. Some even had fallen down buildings that might have been bombed, or at least burned.  Even some of the occupied buildings were in various stages of disrepair.

We also noted a welcome change.  In Florida we always had to eat our snack while seated on the sidewalk or grass in front of the store.  In Georgia, we found comfortable benches or even picnic tables.  Besides providing for more sanitary meals, such facilities make far better venues for chatting with folks and spreading our message. So in at least one small way the storekeepers of Georgia are contributing to the future of earth community and a better world.  So great a mission for a humble wooden bench!

We spent our first two nights in Georgia in what felt in some ways like home.  As some of you know, in Washington State we have a vacation cabin right next to the Trident Submarine Base at Bangor.  In Georgia we stayed at the campground at Crooked River State Park, which is right next door to Bangor’s counterpart, the other Trident Base at King’s Bay.  This base is surrounded by the same high barbed wire topped fences with the same “No Trespassing” signs.  The main gate at this one is adorned with the upper half of a full sized black Trident Sub, which appears to be emerging ominously out of the depths of Mother Earth.

Aside from that, the natural world surrounding the eastern Trident Base is as lush with verdant tranquility as the one back home, and it is just as hard to imagine that this place could have any relationship to nuclear holocausts or mushroom clouds.  Biking into the park was a sail into the essence of peace, that is until the other big cloud hit.  No, it wasn’t the cloudburst early on the morning of our departure when we were trying to pack up.  It was the thick, black cloud of stinging, biting gnats that descended upon us during the thunderstorm.  They stabbed and bit everywhere – face, hands, arms, legs, even our scalps, oblivious of our thick hair.  Their merciless assault immobilized us. George Bush could easily take out the Iraqi Republican Guard if he knew how to harness such a weapon.

As previously mentioned, we are taking a few days off to explore the islands just off the coast of Georgia.  These are graced with miles of sunny beaches, sand dunes, marsh lands, and tropical forests adorned with Spanish moss on live oaks and palmetto undergrowth.  At the turn of the century these beautiful places had fallen into the hands of wealthy robber barons like the Carnegies, Morgans, and Rockefellers, so a prominent feature of these visits have been ruins and even beautifully restored mansions, left now to be viewed and appreciated by the citizenry.

Demilitarize national security systems to the level of a non-provocative defense posture, and convert military resources to peaceful purposes, including ecological restoration.
–  Earth Charter principle IV.16.c.

Our Mission is:
“To aid in the creation of a Global Parliamentary Assembly, elected by the people, to whom the institutions of government and business are held accountable, preferably within an evolving United Nations”. – Preamble to the Charter of the Global Peoples Assembly Movement.

- Dick Burkhart & Mona Lee
  Bike for Global Democracy
  206-851-0027 (cell)
  dickburkhart@attbi.com