The Plight of Forgotten Georgia

Daniel Grove is a small church located

on a red clay dirt road near the border of

Johnson and Washington Counties.

This is Daniel Grove Church. It's an old dirt road church in the middle of nowhere. It borders one of our timber tracts and when I pass that way, I stop in to check on it. It's a peaceful place to me. A lady named Silla Mae who worked for my grandparents was a faithful member of Daniel Grove. Silla didn't drive so I would ride with Grandaddy as a child to take her home in the evenings. Sometimes on Wednesday's we would take her to church for revival meetings and she'd catch a ride home after the service with another member of the congregation. Silla was a dear, sweet soul and her memory is a part of why I keep an eye on the church. Yesterday, I walked to the very back of the cemetery and there I saw a small grave marked only with a little wooden cross made of pressure treated pine. A single, artificial tulip flower was the grave's only decoration. Incidentally, the picture was taken in the afternoon and you can see from the shadow cast by the lone tulip that the grave is perfectly oriented to face the rising sun. Briars are starting to grow over the grave now. It's been there long enough to assume that this is not a temporary situation. The size of the small mound of red clay which is now nearly settled level with the ground leads me to believe that this is the grave of a child. This is an image of what gripping poverty looks like.

 

The attention of a nation is focused on which presidential candidate is the bigger liar and an NFL quarterback with a $100+ million dollar contract who refuses to stand for the National Anthem and here, off of a rural Georgia dirt road behind a small country church under the shade of a pine tree, the body of a child lies in a grave with nothing more than two pieces of scrap wood fashioned into a cross and a plastic flower to mark his or her final resting place. This is inherently wrong. And you have to remind yourself that it really is this bad in many parts of the country. While certain areas prosper, others are completely ignored and neglected - maybe because it's just too painful to stare reality in its cold, hollow eyes. So these people and these places are ignored which makes the plight of forgotten Georgia even worse. Every member of Congress should be forced to place the picture of this grave on their desks and ask themselves daily, "what have I done today to ameliorate situations like this?"