Aint No Love in the Heart of the City

A young African American man on the corner of Broadway and 34th dips and sways to the hot winds of his own sermon late Friday night. The fire burning in his eyes dances like a match sticks flare just before it extinguishes.  So I go to ask him about the ‘hope that is within in him.’

“Yes I have hope,” says the man who calls himself Priest Zabach. “America is going to burn up. America is going to go straight to hell. We are going to enslave the white man and the other nations for a thousand years.”
Zabach is talking about me and is wearing a long black robe and a belt coated with gold tin foil. A Star of David swings defiantly across the front of his cloak. He says he is talking to me because he thinks my name sounds Jewish and my expired Capitol Hill press pass looks legitimate to him. Zabach is a member of the radical religion Twelve Tribes of Israel.

Zabach has that passion and hope in his beliefs that you and I always wanted so badly to have for our own.
Hope like that makes winning a presidential election look like a game of pick-up sticks. With hope like that I would move mountains and bring back the long doubted days of miracles.

“We have hope that the so called ‘blacks,’ the Native Americans and the Hispanics are going to wake up, come back to God realize who they are as God chosen people,” says Zabach.

I know plenty of people who would shout amen to that. A dozen or so African Americans gathered around Zabach and his brothers do shout amen.
“There going to get the hell away from American and these other nations,” shouts  Zabach.

But for some reason no one shouts amen to that hopeful part of the sermon.