it was - um, a fundraising gig ... tcask is a member of community shares of tennessee ... which is a workplace charitable giving federation - like a united way for social change non-profits... and the "campaign" season begins in the fall at various points of the new school year... the federations are asked to speak at the "kick-offs" of various workplace campaigns (e.g. vanderbilt university, state board of regents schools, state employees) and they usually bring one or two agency reps to tell stories about the work they do...
the community shares rep, beverly, had an agency lined up to speak to umc but they cancelled at the last minute... rather than send an e-mail blast to all middle tennessee agencies as she normally did beverly just called me and i agreed to speak on short notice (less than 24 hours)...
i started wondering what felt unique about this gig ... i've done dozens of these in the past 3 years... later that night, after a nashville tcask chapter meeting i dropped someone off at the state office where he was meeting our board chair ... and when i mentioned the gig to amy she clued me in on why this was not your ordinary circumstance...
...so i arrived early at umc and set up still thinking about what i was going to say ... the goal is to pitch our agency, its work and ask people to consider designating a gift to tcask as a part of their charitable giving for that year - fine...
i sat through a united way video which, i must say, is 100% corn syrup (g_d bless em'), and an nccj pitch that went on too long
i joked that if the 2 federations were radio stations united way would be top 40 while community shares would be more of a jazz and blues station ... everyone laughed and that gave me a connection to the audience ... important for what was about to come...
so i told them what i'm telling you and that normally i would say, "blah, blah, blah..." (and i in fact said blah, blah blah which i thought acutely ironic), and then came to, "and tennessee doesn't execute many people - in fact we've killed only one person in the last 45 years ... but we do have a real date set for february 7th, a man named gregory thompson..."
and i gave some background on thompson, his mental illness (schizophrenia, undifferentiated) and how the attorney general had a conservator appointed for him in 2001 so he could be medicated and how the vampire of a public official had the conservator removed in 2004 so that he could kill thompson ...
and then i dropped the bombshell, "and the person whom greg thompson killed 20 years ago - for whose tragic death he is scheduled to die for in a few months was one of your colleagues here at united methodist communications - brenda blanton lane..."
well talk about silence...and some nodding heads...
so i told them about the press release we issued state wide when thompson's day was set and how the shelbyville gazette times ran a fair story the next day based on our release and that the following day a friend of brenda lane's wrote an op-ed the day after that and shared some of her thoughts with them...
brenda's friend said that she believed that brenda would have been one of the first people to forgive thompson, her killer, for what he had done - and there was some nodding in the audience... but that she didn't think she could do that, she didn't think she had that in her... but then she added that she didn't believe that she could be the one to inject lethal chemicals into thompson's body and kill him...
boy, was i a bummer! i had really let the air out of united way's little cute party... oh well...
the rest is a blur, i remember, drawing some sort of parallel between brenda blanton lane's family and gregory thompson's family and the grief that they would eventually hold in common if the state does in fact kill the severely mentally ill thompson...
in the end i was told that i hadn't done a presentation at all but delivered a powerful witness - nuff said'...
anyways, not all speaking gigs are equal...
peace out <3
No comments:
Post a Comment