Hometown Prophet

A couple of weeks ago I came home from seminary and immediately jumped into helping my father win an a town election.  He won the race for selectman and everyone is happy.

Much of the work that goes into helping with a town election for grunts like me entails holding signs.  On the day of the election I found myself holding a sign (or two) for ten hours.  At one point that meant standing next to a fine gentleman that I like quite a bit, though until then I hadn't much opportunity to talk to him during the past few years of knowing him.  Most of the time we were telling stories, long stories: apparently he and my father are the kings of telling long stories.

I don't usually tell long stories.  I just have a lot of stories that I tell in quick fashion.  One of the stories I told that day was how I had bicycled across the country to fight human trafficking.  He responded as most people do, "Wow, are you serious?!"  And then a few seconds later, "That's so disturbing.  I don't know why anyone would use someone like that.  Hopefully our government can step into other countries and stop it."  I was proud of him until that last sentence.

What surprises me about the interaction is how little some people know about domestic human trafficking even in my hometown.  Lack of awareness is an on-going issue that I've written about, and to some extent I think it's the major issue when it comes to trying to fight the evil, but since I decided to go on my bike trip I have not spent much time at home.  Now that I have it's rather upsetting that people that I know and have known for a long time, people that I respect, and people that I thought would have read the article about my bike trip in our town newspaper and that I thought were following this blog, continue to have little idea about just how serious human trafficking is in our world today.  Yes, I am glad that this man showed more concern about those held in slavery than most people that I talk to do, but I still think even the most concern does little good when it is directed internationally and is totally ignorant of how serious it is around our homes.

Granted, I can't expect everyone that I come across to be up to speed on the issue nor can I expect them to have followed my trip with ever-attentive eyes.  In a lot of ways it's good because, I mean, that's my mission: to make others aware.  I'd be silly to think that a few months, even an impressive few months, would fulfill my mission.  Still, I'm beginning to understand what people like Jesus and Mohammed knew, that prophets are very rarely accepted in their hometown.  Part of that is because people know me for who I am with all of my deficiencies and I can't simply be that great guy who biked across the country.  But a lot of that is because, knowing me, hometown folk believe that "this guy" can't have much to say that they don't already know.

I don't mean to say that I'm a prophet.  I simply mean that the experience I have had at home so far reminds me of how much harder a person with a universal mission must work in their hometown.  It's a good thing that I've always wanted to make Hudson, MA a great place--perhaps, through many, many years of hard toil, Hudson can become a model for the fight against slavery.