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| Home Information About Us and Our Mission, Plan, Ideas, History and Song. |
| Human Family Reunion We come today with open minds and warm hearts. |
| How Now Do I Live My Life? Final exam essays from my class called U.S. Pluralism and taught at William Jewell College. |
| Don Quixote Project Information about the World Class Person in Training Contest |
| Help Us Information on how you or your organization can join our cause. |
| DQ Award Winners For seeing the world as it should be and including all of us in its vision, HateBusters awards its highest honor, the DQ Award. |
| Books Books written by our founder Ed Chasteen. |
| Current Projects Read about the many ways Hatebusters work with individuals and organizations. |
| Visits Reports on the many places Hatebusters has visited. |
| News Articles News Articles |
| Feedback What others are saying about Hatebusters. |
| One in a Million I have a Dream |
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 Saturday, May 22, 2010 Setting at Liberty Those Who Live with Limitations 816-803-8371 Box 442 Liberty, MO 64069 RideforMS@aol.com www.greaterliberty.org From Biscari Brothers Bicycles in Liberty. Three great routes! Fully supported. A full description of our ride will soon appear on our website. |
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How Do We Live Together After 9-11? April 20, 2007 April 20, 2007 April 19, 2007 April 17, 2007 April 11, 2007 March 28, 2007 March 7, 2007 January 31, 2007 January 25, 2007 December 22, 2006 December 20, 2006 December 7, 2006 November 10, 2006 October 31, 2006 October 23, 2006 October 3, 2006 September 26, 2006 September 18, 2006 September 12, 2006 September 7, 2006 September 5, 2006 August 27, 2006 July 24, 2006 July 18, 2006 July 7, 2006 June 11, 2006 May 26, 2006 May 22, 2006 May 9, 2006 Let all sit down to dinner together April 18, 2006 February 4, 2006 January 18, 2006 January 15, 2006 January 10, 2006 Janurary 2, 2006 December 31, 2005 December 23, 2005 December 19, 2005 December 5, 2005 November 28, 2005 November 28, 2005 November 28, 2005 November 15, 2005 November 11, 2005 November 5, 2005 October 21, 2005 September 18, 2005 September 14, 2005 September 12, 2005 September 6, 2005 August 5, 2005 July 21, 2005 July 21, 2005 June 17, 2005 May 21, 2005 May 21, 2005 May 17, 2005 April 29, 2005 April 15, 2005 April 14, 2005 March 11, 2005 March 11, 2005 February 19, 2005 February 17, 2005 February 11, 2005 February 6, 2005 February 3, 2005 February 3, 2005 January 11, 2005 January 1, 2005 December 25, 2004 An Invitation to Celebration December 6, 2004 ACHIEVER: National MS society honors volunteer November 29, 2004 Ring Dem Bells November 15, 2004 October 22 2004 October 15, 2004 October 11, 2004 October 11, 2004 September 29, 2004 September 13, 2004 September 7, 2004 September 4, 2004 September 11-12, 2004 August 29, 2004 August 16, 2004 August 12, 2004 July 27, 2004 July 25,2004 July 19, 2004 July 18, 2004 July 15, 2004 July 15, 2004 July 9, 2004 June 28, 2004 June 04, 2004 June 04, 2004 May 24, 2004 May 10, 2004 May 4, 2004 April 24, 2004 April 25, 2004 April 17, 2004 March 23, 2004 March 11, 2004 February 16, 2004 January 26, 2004 January 26, 2004 January 23, 2004 December 29, 2003 December 29, 2003 December 23, 2003 December 19, 2003 December 19, 2003 10,000 November 29, 2003 November 25, 2003 November 27, 2003 November 26, 2003 November 29, 2003 November 23, 2003 November 22, 2003 November 20, 2003 November 19, 2003 November 18, 2003 November 17, 2003 November 15, 2003 November 14, 2003 November 13, 2003 November 11, 2003 November 10, 2003 November 8, 2003 November 6, 2003 November 4, 2003 November 3, 2003 November 1, 2003 October 31, 2003 October 30, 2003 October 29, 2003 October 24-28, 2003 October 23, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 19, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 10, 2003 October 9, 2003 October 3-5, 2003 October 1, 2003 September 27, 2003 September 26, 2003 September 25, 2003 September 24, 2003 September 23, 2003 September 22, 2003 September 23, 2003 September 10, 2003 September 10, 2003 September 6-7, 2003 September 4, 2003 September 3, 2003 September 2, 2003 August 30, 2003 August 29, 2003 August 28, 2003 August 27, 2003 August 25, 2003 August 23, 2003 August 22, 2003 August 21, 2003 August 19, 2003 August 18, 2003 August 16, 2003 August 13, 2003 August 12, 2003 August 11, 2003 August 9, 2003 August 7, 2003 July 24, 2003 July 24, 2003 July 13, 2003 July 3, 2003 June 24, 2003 May 10, 2003 June 9, 2003 June 2, 2003 Ed's Elite 100 Bike Ride May 22, 2003 May 21, 2003 May 19, 2003 May 10, 2003 May 9, 2003 April 6, 2003 March 27, 2003 April 1, 2003 April 26, 2003 March 15, 2003 March 5, 2003 March 5, 2003 March 5, 2003 February 11, 2003 February 10, 2003 January 28, 2003 January 20, 2003 November 3, 2002 September 12, 2002 September 10, 2002 August 24, 2002 August 19, 2002 August 9, 2002 August 6, 2002 August 6, 2002 July 30, 2002 July 2002 June 29, 2002 May 18, 2002 April 16, 2002 April 16, 2002 April 16, 2002 April 9, 2002 March 31, 2002 March 12, 2002 February 23, 2002 |
From Ed Chasteen
Many of my friends gathered at my church Sunday morning, January 30. Hundreds in person. Hundreds more in spirit. The music was wonderful. Rich Groves said good things about me. Rabbi Levin put suffering in perspective. I got to preach. The MS Society gave me an award. I have it all on CD and cassette tape. I’ll send you one for a donation to MS. I hope to raise $20,000 this year for MS. Make your check to Ed’s $20,000 MS Campaign. Mail to Box 442, Liberty, MO 64069. Tell me whether you want CD or tape. Reflections About Ed Chasteen – January 30, 2005 When I was asked to share some reflections about Ed Chasteen, I was told I had 5 minutes. That’s just not enough time. But I will do my best to give you my insights in 5 minutes. I have been blessed over the past 15 years to have spent hundreds of hours with Ed Chasteen riding bicycles, sharing stories while enjoying biscuits and gravy and other non-healthy food at Ed’s favorite small town cafes and driving to and from our favorite riding places. Beyond that we have worked together to plan four major bicycle rides. I have heard every corny joke Ed has ever told and have read just about everything he has written during those years - and much of what he wrote about his bicycle experiences before I first started riding with him. I know the TRUTH about Ed Chasteen. From my perspective there are THREE terms that describe Ed Chasteen: “family man”, “integrity” and “loyalty”. The tools he uses are his bicycle, his enthusiasm and the written word. His own solid religious faith is a constant. It is from that core that he reaches out to appreciate and try to understand all types of people. Beyond his deep religious faith, his own family comes first. He and his family have traditions and celebrations that always take first place on his calendar. Whether it is planning something special for his and Bobbie’s wedding anniversary on April 19, a summer week or a winter retreat with the whole extended family or to be available any time his granddaughter, Lara, wants to do anything with him. Ed delights in his family, their family activities, the games they play and any time they can get together. His bicycle riding family comes a close 2nd. That community has grown quite large. Over the years more than a hundred of us have shared Saturday morning rides with Ed. But there are about a dozen or so regular riders who show up for our Saturday morning rides - 12 months a year if the weather is decent at all. Decent is defined as not raining or snowing and not freezing. We ride to one of Ed's favorite small town cafes, have a good time coming and going and have a leisurely time talking and eating. Then, when Ed gets home, he writes about our day together and sends his riding family an e-mail to share his impressions. Sometimes those musings end up in the local newspaper. Then there is his family of MS fund raisers. He has been a great inspiration to many people to participate in and donate to the M/S 150. He has ridden in all but one of the Kansas City area MS 150s over the past 20 years. He has become one of the very most successful stimulators for donations to MS through the MS 150. He has also inspired us to have an annual spring fund-raising ride here in the Northland. Our 3rd annual Greater Liberty Ride for M/S will be Saturday, May 21. Finally, there is his Human Family. He organizes Human Family Reunions 2 or 3 times a year and brings together a diverse group of people from all types of religions, all types of ethnic backgrounds and all races. Many of those people are here today or will be at the 11 o’clock service. At those events special recognition is given to those who embody the principles of his HateBusters organization or who have given signficant support to it. Ed is inspired by his literary hero, Don Quixote, The Man of La Mancha. He is delightfully unrealistic. He challenges himself and others to do things that at first seem un-doable. And he coins and practices phrases like "audacious asking". He has taught us all what that type of asking can do to advance the good causes he believes in. Ed is extremely loyal. This applies to his family, his friends, his church and his politics. I have tried repeatedly, but unsuccessfully, to encourage him to change his politics. He is considerate to a fault with anyone he meets - never a cross word to anyone. Ed is a gifted writer with a delightful way of telling stories about the people he meets and the experiences he has had. He has an uncanny memory for sentences, paragraphs, maybe chapters, of his favorite books, poems and songs. Perhaps the best way to summarize the Ed Chasteen I know is how he brings together so many different people. In his own considerate, friendly but steadfast way he draws us into doing good things and thinking good thoughts about others. He is truly an ambassador of the concept in a book he wrote: “How to Like People Who Aren’t Like You.”
I will never forget the first man, Kipp Weiner, who told me that he was grateful that he had AIDS because for the first time his life had purpose. It was so counter-intuitive, given how much we fight against dying, that I had to get him to repeat what he had said. Then, my mind rebelled so thoroughly at the concept of appreciating what was then an illness that no one survived more than two years, that I tried to understand what psychological mechanism Kipp was applying to cope with his illness. This rather than hearing what he was actually saying. A difference between children and adults is that God built into the human being that children create meaning from getting and adults create meaning from giving. But we live today in a world in which the culture teaches that life is about getting. It encourages us to remain children, self-centered and self absorbed. Life revolves around us. And so, when we don’t get what we believe we deserve in life, life disappoints us. Some people never ask, “are we disappointing life?” Life offers so many amusements in our day that most of us never need to face this question until we are much older. But those who suffer intractable pain, or confront their mortality, or are trapped in an unflinching and inescapable moral dilemma, find that we must decide the ultimate question: What is my life about? What might we do to create meaning in life? No end exists to what the body desires. Feed it a little and it will only want more. If a little is good, more is better. But down this path lies self-absorption, and loneliness. The antidote to the poison of tragedy is the elixir of connection to other living things. The same God who implanted within us the ineluctable need for meaning to keep us going, also placed within us the capacity for altruism: giving without regard for self. And the amazing thing about this God given capacity is that every time we give without regard for ourselves, we feel good inside. Walk down the street and pick up a piece of trash off the sidewalk that someone else left. Put it in a public trash can, and God rewards you with a satisfied feeling, like you just saved the world. Buy a hungry adult a meal, dry an unknown child’s tears, run an errand for a sick person and suddenly you feel that that life really does have meaning, that we were placed here for a greater purpose than ourselves and that fulfilling that purpose gives us a place in the web of eternity. Our lives matter, and may even matter infinitely, beyond our expectations. What Kipp discovered was the irony that we are only meaningful when we are meaningless, at least in our own eyes. Kipp gave the remainder of his life to educating about AIDS, and they were the most meaningful years he lived. Then why is it that people often cannot discover this until it is too late, until cancer threatens their lives, or some addiction, or they hit bottom and can’t muster the spiritual strength to continue on? It is because the world rewards those who are full of themselves, and we believe that feeding the body and the ego means success. We live in a culture that even teaches the ultimate profanity: that loving is about what you get rather than what you give. Why is it that in an age of so much plenty we live in the midst of so much despair, with so many people needing psychological mood elevators, with shopping addiction as a real diagnosis? Because the capitalist culture does not explain life’s meaning, only how to maximize receiving. Meaningful life is cheap: love unstintingly, give endlessly of yourself, care ceaselessly, bond with other living things interminably, receive gratefully. We are trapped in mortal bodies. None of us escapes this life alive. Some die though their bodies don’t know it. Some live though their bodies have died. The choice of a meaningful life is ours, if we will but live beyond ourselves to connect selflessly with others.
By that Sunday morning I had been in church thousands of times. I was only 14 years old, but my mother had started me in church when I was too small to have anything else to do. By the time I could think for myself, those stories of David, Samson, Moses and Jesus had taken over my mind, and there was no place I had rather be than in church where I could hear more. The Reverend Dr. Gordon Clinard never raised his voice. Never gestured with his hands. But his elegant and eloquent sermons were powerful and transported me to heaven itself. That morning he preached about loving all people. I knew he did it. I saw him about town during the week. As I got up from my pew that morning, I knew that come Monday morning everybody in Huntsville, Texas would love everybody. I was in heaven. That feeling lasted until I reached the church door. There stood two deacons. As I walked past I overheard one say, “If them niggers try to come in this church, I’ll beat ‘em back with a baseball bat.” Said the other, “Me too.” Those are the only words I remember from those two men. Like neon in the night they blink off and on in my mind to this day. How hate can exist in the presence of love became the question that would not let me alone. I kept hearing that song I had learned in the primary department in Sunday School. “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children.” In college Bible classes in Texas, I had studied Dr. Hester’s books. When I joined the William Jewell faculty in 1965 and discovered he was here, I was in awe. When he invited me to his house to play rook, I thought I was in heaven. Dr. Hester has been gone for some years now, but I’m still in heaven. The year I came to Jewell I began to teach Race Relations at Jewell. I taught that class for 30 years. Thousands of students let me help them find ways to understand and overcome hate. With them I went to visit people of other races and religions. We made three rules for ourselves: (1) We do not come to change you: (2) We do not come to join you; (3) We come to be friends. None of us is born knowing anyone. I think the purpose of life is to make friends of as many people as possible. My students let me help them make friends with people of other races and religions. When over the years I would get job offers in other places, I would say no. I could not leave this place where we were making friends. Then in 1981 my world ended. A doctor came to the door of my hospital room. From the doorway he shouted toward me as I lay in a bed on the far side of the room. “You have MS. It’s a damnable disease and you can’t be active.” He turned and waked away. Depression followed. And thoughts of suicide. For three years I gave up everything except coming to church and teaching my classes. Then one day I spied my son’s old bicycle in a corner of the garage. I thought I heard someone say, “Ride that bike.” Three more years passed. On a Monday morning in May 1987, I got on a bicycle at Disney World in Orlando, planning to pedal to Disneyland in California. All my life in church I had heard that each of us is created in God’s image. I figured that must mean that each of us has at least a spark of goodness and genius inside us. I wanted to find that spark. I planned to ride alone and without money across America. All along the way I would ask for water, a sandwich, a bed for the night. I took no map. I would ask people in every town how to get to the next. If people did, indeed, have a spark of goodness, they would feed me and shelter me. If they had a spark of genius, they would know the best way to get from place to place. I had another reason for riding. That doctor had said I couldn’t be active. I wanted to prove him wrong. I made it across the country. More than 500 people I asked for help. No one said no. I found their spark of goodness and genius. And I proved my doctor wrong. My MS means I must be active. I had been back a year when a member of the KKK was elected to the Louisiana Legislature. My students and I started HateBusters. The Governor of Louisiana invited us to come help the state redeem itself. Then we began to be invited by other governors, mayors, preachers, rabbis, imams, students and citizens. We asked airlines to fly us free of charge around the country so we could teach people how to like each other. Everywhere we go, we organize bike rides for the town. When reporters come to ask why we ride, we tell them about the Human Family Reunions we hold in every town. Everybody brings a dish of their favorite food and we have a giant potluck dinner. Who’s right is the wrong question this night. Our sole—and soul—agenda is to get to know one another and begin becoming friends. I have convinced myself that bike riding is the only medicine I need to keep my MS at bay. If I ride, I can run. If I don’t, I can’t walk. But if bike riding were good only for my physical health, I couldn’t find the motivation to get me on that bicycle in every season of the year in all kinds of weather. I must be more than simply healthy. I must have a mission. Bustin’ hate is my mission. It has been since that Sunday morning when I was 14 and overheard those two deacons. And when my mind is fixed on bustin’ hate, it has no time to think about MS. And if I don’t think about it, I have told myself, it can’t do to me what it might otherwise do. Beating MS and bustin’ hate have fused into a single mission that I cannot abandon. It will not let me alone. With my eyes on the prize, ain’t nobody gonna turn me around. In the first verse of Chapter 12, the Apostle Paul in the Book of Romans, says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is the good and perfect and acceptable will of God.” Without knowing they were doing it, those deacons and that doctor ushered me by their unwelcome and unpleasant remarks into another world. A world best described by our HateBusters motto: Red and Yellow, Black, Brown and White Don Quixote’s friends think he is a fool for trying to right the world’s wrongs. They say to him, “Wickedness wears thick armor.” He responds, “And for that you would have me surrender? Nay, the enchanter may confuse the outcome ten thousand times. Still must a man arise and again do battle, for the effort is sublime.” Indeed it is. AMEN! |
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