Everyone Was Kung Fu Fighting

When I was in High School, one of my assignments was to perform community charity. My teacher hooked me up with the President of “The Appalachian Club” at the local college. I was allowed to join the club on several weekend trips into eastern Kentucky to an impoverished area that a coal mine company had abondoned years prior. As a seventeen year old, young man from an upper middle class community, I was astonished to discover so much poverty and suffering right here in the United States. People were living in shacks, with no electricity, no plumbing, heated by a coal burning, pot belly stove. There was no High School and most kids my age were already married with kids. Most families had at least one child with a mental handicap. We went around a few communities, checking on people the Club had befriended. We visited an old folk’s home; checked in on an Arts and Crafts Center the Club had donated money to; and, helped a woman move from a shack she could no longer pay the rent for into an abandoned school bus left on the side of the road. It was a confusing trip for me because on the one hand I was having a blast being with these college kids, away from home and having fun; but on the other hand, I was confronted with a foreign lifestyle of pain, suffering, destitution, ignorance and fear. It was an education and an adventure all in one. On the last night of our trip we travelled to a nearby town having an Apple Harvest celebration. There was a band playing music for a community, barnyard square dance with over a hundred people participating in each dance. I was one of four guys in the group with six girls so I was busy all night long. Each dance lasted over a half an hour as you and your partner travelled in opposite directions around the circle of dancers, doing what the singer called out with the other dancers until you finally met up again with your partner. I had a blast. The town had only one record that they played over and over several times between each square dance to give the band a break. So now, every time I hear the song, “Kung Fu Fighting”, I am taken back to that place in time and in my mind, when a very lucky young man, with a very easy upbringing, learned that not everyone had it so good and that you didn’t have to go to third world countries to find poverty - we have it right here in our own backyard. (I know it's a stretch, but this is for the Kung Fu theme.)