Why, hello there! The SuperForest Sundae is a weekly serving of various bits and bobs SuperForester April has repackaged for your enjoyment. Dig in.
A great documentary
This is an 8-minute version of a longer doco titled Beauty And The Bike. The film follows two groups of young women from Darlington, UK, and Bremen, Germany. Between them, they discover what makes – and stops – teenage girls from cycling. The answer? “It’s the infrastructure, stupid!” The full DVD is available from Bike Beauty.
An amazing transformation
Johnny Lee Clary joined the Ku Klux Klan as a little boy. After his father shot himself and his mother abandoned him, more than anything, he just wanted to belong. So when the KKK approached him offering him a “family” and a place in their clan, he jumped at it.
“I was the kid that nobody wanted. I was that rotten kid that was gonna end up in jail. And then all of sudden, here’s this Klansman telling me I’m gonna be a part of a society that’s gonna treat me as a family member. And, man, that really got my attention, so that’s why I joined.”
Over the years, Johnny moved up the ranks and was chosen to be the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. In this role, he was responsible for some horrific actions, many directed at a man named Reverend Wade Watts – the state leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, who’d also worked with Martin Luther King. But the more hatred Johnny and the clan threw at the reverend (they burnt a cross across the street from his house, even set fire to his church), the more love he returned.
As time progressed, Johnny began to doubt his involvement in the clan and the work he was doing. He found out his girlfriend was an FBI informant. The clan turned against him thinking he was somehow leaking information to the FBI. Not long after, he called Reverend Wade Watts.
“I said, ‘Listen, I got out of the Klan’. He goes, ‘Oh, I knew you was going to’. And I said, ‘I feel like I’m supposed to go out and start helping people and speaking’. And he goes, ‘Well, have you spoken anywhere yet?’ And I said, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘Well, how about speaking to my all-black church?’. He said, ‘You do remember my church, don’t you, Johnny?’. And I said, ‘Yeah’. And I said, ‘How do I get there?’ He goes, ‘You oughta know, you burnt it down’.
“And then he got up there and told the congregation. He goes, ‘Church, we’re gonna really be blessed. Next Sunday we’re gonna have the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan come preach for you’. And that scared the congregation, they said, ‘Reverend Watts, don’t bring that man here, he did horrible things to us’. He goes, ‘That’s the same thing they said about Saul when he became apostle Paul. I’m gonna have him’. And a friendship was born. Reverend Wade Watts and I became best of friends.”
Today, Johnny is a changed man, a man on a mission to educate children of the dangers of hate. “The youth of today will decide what kind of nation or what kind of world we all live in tomorrow. And that’s what I’m aiming to do … that’s why I travel around the world. Because I’m sick of racism and prejudice and I’m gonna do something about it,” he says.
His story is endlessly fascinating to me as it so powerfully reveals our capacity for change, for growth, for love.
Read a transcript of the full Enough Rope interview here.
How sexy is your toilet?
Millions of children die every year from a lack of clean toilets. Knowing this, a man named Jack Sim, who jokingly calls himself ‘Toilet Man’, founded the World Toilet Organization – in an effort to make the humble toilet a status symbol for the poor. “You don’t improve toilets when you don’t talk about it,” says Jack. He’s got some interesting ideas on encouraging people to take sanitation seriously by making toilets a status symbol in the developing world. Listen to Jack explain this issue and his plans to instill change here.
Photo: WorldToilet (Flickr.com/ Creative Commons)
World Toilet Day in Singapore – The World’s Longest Queue was an event to highlight the lack access to toilets in some countries.
A song to get you groovin’
This track is called Learnalilgivinanlovin by Gotye. I love the lyrics: “Give away love, give it for free”! (And the way it makes the hips move).
Have a great one!
April
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