Travel, Teaching and Music

My unspoken Mission Statement for this Blog is to speak what’s on my mind and what’s on my mind is whatever the day brings me. No surprise to any reader that I’ve been heavily focused on trying to make sense of and shed light on the current political situation. Between the No Kings Rally, visits to two Civil Rights Museum, posts I’m seeing on Facebook, it makes perfect sense that the last seven posts or so are heavily weighted to commentary on those issues. 

 

But here I’ll put my traveling music teacher hat back on and close out March with a few personal reflections.

 

Accenting the traveling, I find myself loving the stimuli of going to new places and seeing new things and meeting new people in a kind of Travels with Charley road trip in blessed solitude. (No dog by my side). The freedom to go where I want when I want and the extra perk of great weather, friendly people, the green trees of Springtime and the rolling Mississippi River. 

 

Accenting the teacher, it is sheer joy to work with 350 children doing an arrangement I created—without me having to teach it to them! Not that I wouldn’t have loved that, but something fun about having them prepared by other teachers and I just get to come in like the Lone Ranger and put on the finishing touches. Equally delightful to sit through rehearsals of the other eight pieces they’re preparing for tomorrow’s concert with an audience of over a thousand people. This is the Memphis Annual All-City Concert where four or so 5^th graders from each of the 96 local public schools come together to perform. An impressive undertaking that has been going on every year since 1968!! And to top it off, well over 50% of the kids and many of the teachers are Black Americans. This is simply unheard of in the Orff world within which I travel. 

 

Accenting the music, I went last night with my friend/ Orff colleague Elisabeth to the Blues City Café on Beales Street and heard some rockin’ R & B blues. Of course I did! It’s Memphis! The piano player played like Jerry Lee Lewis and I just found out today that he just bought a house where Jerry Lee Lewis lived! That’s one way to absorb the style! It was a great band and Elisabeth and I even danced a little bit. Later, she told me that she’s been going two or three times a week and she discovered that her unrelenting symptoms of Long Covid mysteriously disappeared. Alongside some other health challenges she had. Talk about direct testimony of the healing power of music! Wish I knew that story before sending my Humanitarian Musician book off to the printer!

 

Today after rehearsal, we went to the Stax Records Museum, another super-impressive exhibit honoring both the record company and its recording artists— Sam Cooke, Booker T. and the MG’s, Otis Redding, Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers, Albert King and more. Once again, the supreme and maddening irony that the people who virtually created the American musical landscape through which so many of us have driven and walked and danced and lived and loved are the same people with a forever target on their back tattooed on by the hateful half of our divided nation. 

 

And so ends this glorious month of March that began with my Flowers and Thorns post. Remember that calendar quote? The reminder that I have the power to choose a path of flowers or thorns? Not in a naïve way— the world will and has and will continue to scratch me with its sharp pointed thorns, but I can choose how to either sidestep them or endure the pricks while smelling the flowers. I’m happy to report that in these last 31 days, I more or less have been able to do so. 

 

Happy upcoming April to all! 

Don't Mourn— Organize

That was the motto of the resistance group known as The Wobblies? Never heard of them? Of course you haven’t. No schools generally have seen it as a good idea to teach children about the history of protest and resistance in this country and that decision to casually choose ignorance has now grown to full-out prohibition of telling the truth to children in schools. So short story:

 

“The Wobblies” is the nickname for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a democratic international labor union founded in 1905. It fought against the seven-day work week, long hours, low wages and harsh and dangerous working conditions. It sought to include those who had been excluded by traditional unions based on race, gender and creed. It stood for worker control of production and wages in the face of big bosses getting rich off their labor and who were supported by the police and government. Stories about great government-sanctioned violence done to striking workers to protect the sacred creed of capitalism— profits over people—abound. (Check out the book The Cold Millions by Jess Walter, Woody Guthrie’s song The 1913 Massacre and the movie How Green Was My Valley to get a taste of these stories.)

 

When a fellow worker died from a coal mine collapsing or was murdered by vigilante thugs or local police, the IWW response was “Don’t mourn—organize!” (I would amend that to “Mourn—and then organize!). And after visiting my second Civil Rights Museum in a row—the first in Jackson, Mississippi, the next at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, my takeaway was a reminder of the extraordinary grief of the ongoing (through centuries) purposeful plague, scourge, curse of White Supremacy and the extraordinary intelligence, determination and comradery of organized resistance each and every step of the way by the Black people in this nation. In the 50’s and 60’s, such strategic, non-violent and organized responses to the next wave of government-approved, initiated, sanctioned violence against its Black citizens included:

• Sit-ins at lunch counters.

• Sit-ins at libraries.

• Sit-ins at select businesses. 

• The bus boycott.

• Business boycotts.

• School integration.

• Voter registration.

• Caucuses at Democratic Conventions.

• More.

 

I feel so proud that resistance is finally on the rise from white citizens previously content to just let things be because they were not at risk, benefitted by our white supremacist history and just wanted to—and had the privilege to—get on with their lives. But if there is any upside to the horror of the Trumpist regime and agenda, it is in the way they have laid bare the facts that we all suffer when the 1% of billionaires are in charge, that systems built on hatred and exclusion damage us all, that none of us are immune from the next attack on our basic rights and dignity. 

 

But walking through these museums, it strikes me that we have to do much more than just show up on the streets in fun costumes and clever signs. We need to learn from our resistance forebears how to strategically organize our energies as they have shown us how to do. Can we consider a general strike? Boycotts? Continued voter registration at massive levels? The models are in place and they indeed proved to be effective. Study any one of them (I find the Bus Boycott in Montgomery to be particularly inspiring) and learn. 

And if you’re in shouting distance of the two museums mentioned above, by all means, go! As well as the African American History Museum in Washington, the Whitney Plantation outside New Orleans, the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham or any one of the dozens of such museums throughout the country. The foundation of resistance is strong and well-documented. Let’s move forward from that base. 

Modern Day Caesar

As reported in Wikipedia: 

 

“Shortly before 15 February 44 BC, Roman Emperor Julius Ceasar assumed the dictatorship for life, putting an end to any hopes that his powers would be merely temporary. Transforming his dictatorship into one for life clearly showed to all contemporaries that Caesar had no intention to restore a free republic and that no free republic could be restored so long as he was in power.

 

The ancient sources are unanimous that this reflected a genuine turn in public opinion against Caesar.  Popular indignation at Caesar was likely rooted in his debt policies (too friendly to lenders), use of lethal force to suppress protests for debt relief, his reduction in the grain dole, his abolition of Clodius’s collegia—neighborhood associations and professional guild that created a powerful, organized street-level political base, his abolition of the poorest panel of jurors in the permanent courts, and his abolition of open elections which deprived the people of their ancient right of decision.”

 

Sound familiar? Here we are again, 2,000 years later. Some minor details have changed, but mostly the same old tired playbook of despots and dictators. And how did that end back then?

 

Well, read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, written some 1500 years later. Shakespeare’s lines (with a little shifting to modern people) resonate five centuries ahead to describe pretty well where we are now:

 

“The birds of night (Drumf’s Twitter babble and endless lies) did sit at the noonday upon the market place hooting and shrieking…let not men say, ‘These are their reasons, they are natural.’ For I believe they are portentous things unto the climate that they point to. Indeed, it is a strange-disposed time.”

 

 “But if you would consider the true cause, Why all these fires, why all these gliding ghosts, why birds and beasts act unnaturally, why old men fool and children calculate, why all these things change from their ordinary state, their natures and natural faculties to monstrous quality, why you shall find that heaven hath infused them with these spirits to make them instruments of fear and warning unto some monstrous state.” (ACT I. Sc. III 65)

 

“Cassius (the people) from bondage will deliver Cassius (the people). Therein, ye gods, make the weak most strong. Therein, ye gods, tyrants do defeat. Nor stony tower nor walls of beaten brass nor airless dungeon nor strong links of iron can hold down the strength of spirit, for life, being weary of these worldly bars, never lacks power to (redeem) itself.” (ACT 1. Sc. III 95-105)

 

What trash is Rome (the United States), what rubbish, what offal, when it serves for the base matter to illuminate so vile a thing as Caesar (you know who). (ACT 1. Sc. III 112-155)

 

“The abuse (that occurs) when it disjoins remorse from power. (ACT II Sc. 1 -17)

 

"My ancestors did from the streets of Rome the Tarquin drive when he was called a king. We must “Speak! Strike! Redress!” (Hence, No Kings Rallies)

 

“(Oh, Orange Man,) where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage? You hide it in smiles and affability.” (ACT II Sc. 1 -85)

 

“Then fall Caesar (Maggot-Man)! Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead! Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets! (ACT II Sc. 1 -85)

In the play, Brutus and conspirators assassinate Caesar. Tempting conclusion, but that playbook has also run its course. I do not wish for our modern-day Caesar to be murdered, nor die of natural causes and escape accountability. I want him and each and every one of his shameless enablers and supporters to be dragged off to jail as proven traitors, charged and convicted with treason alongside all their other crimes. Maybe a year in Parchman Prison in Mississippi, alongside the rats and mice and violent guards, to face this creation of their own privilege. Then years of rehabilitation left alone with babies and responsible for feeding them diapering them, soothing them when they’re shrieking, eventually playing with them cooking for them, reading to them (from an acceptable reading list—Mein Kampf and The Art of the Deal are both banned).

Don't have much hope their hardened hearts are capable of softening, but want to say that we tried. Meanwhile, with. them safely tucked away, perhaps the rest of us can finally can on with the business of living well. One can only dream. 

Beyond the Farce

I do believe that understanding in every field of human endeavor is both necessary and helpful and perhaps that’s why I’m a lifelong teacher. Understanding the forces that brought us to this particular impasse in our political history helps relieve some of the outrage and the shock. Once we understand what is behind where and who we are in this moment, we have the possibility of re-writing the script. That’s why genuine education and knowledge and understanding is always a threat to the fascists. 

 

I’m re-reading a novel I remember loving called The Brother’s K by David James Duncan. First published in 1992, it follows a family in the Pacific Northwest through the 50’s and on through the early 70’s, an almost exact parallel to my own upbringing and so a perfect mirror to some of my experience. Along the way, we encounter a lot about baseball (the father is a pitcher in the minor leagues) and includes the names and exploits of some New York Yankees I knew and followed. The brothers in the book come of age in more or less the same years I did. One becomes a political radical and draft-dodger, another a spiritual seeker interested in Buddhism and Hinduism, one gets drafted and goes to Vietnam. To top it off, the mother is a born-again Christian fundamentalist—the whole nine yards of that exhilarating and difficult time when all our cultural premises were under question and new worlds opening. 

In a particularly powerful passage (p. 351), the author gives clear insight into the dynamics that drove the 60’s and continue to echo today. As we read and recognize the same playbook with different characters and language, it might help us understand why what is happening is happening. In many ways, it is not an anomaly in what used to be a more fair and equitable democracy, but a logical extension of our brutal history, side-by-side with the resistance that held the dyke from complete flooding democracy’s promise. Here is the passage: 

 

In the decade after World War II a number of very powerful American politicians discovered farce. These politicians had such Machiavellian philosophies and rudimentary senses of humor that they didn’t recognize it as a cathartic or comic genre. But they did recognize its power over people. They therefore began applying none of farce’s funniness but all of its unscrupulousness to such tasks as smearing opponents to win elections, groveling shamelessly after the lowest common prejudices of the people, blacklisting dissent, whitewashing corruption and prostituting themselves to wealthy private backers who used them to de-democratize entire constituencies.

 

Take a moment to pause here and read that last sentence again (boldface mine). Do you feel how deeply it resonates and perfectly expresses exactly what’s going down now? Read it again. And again. Post it on your refrigerator. If people can begin to see through it, it all loses its power. Read on.

 

Though quite a few citizens soon recognized that incredible abuses of power were taking place, there seemed to be no rational, non-farcical way to combat them. The crowd-pleasing, pilfered genre had mated with democracy and produced a seemingly invincible bastard government by force of farce…Farce worked like a charm, and no one who cared about integrity or truth had any idea how to protest or resist. 

 

The McCarthy hearings, the Birmingham bombings, the Vietnam War, Nixon’s Watergate, Reagan’s welfare queens and trickle-down theory and Star Wars shields. Farce, farce, farce. And none of it was funny.

 

…it eventually became apparent to a great many Americans that we were no longer the audience of our D.C. farce-writers: we had become the boobs and butts of their humorless scripts…Our lives were being violated, trivialized, and in tens of thousands of cases terminated by the trite machinations of these sickenly powerful men. 

 

All of which led to the greatest farce of all time— a twice-elected narcissistic psychopath, liar, cheater, adulterer, pedophile, brainless, heartless, pitiful excuse for a human being. And still speaking of the early 70’s, the author continues:

 

This was when the resistance finally began. Having nothing to lose and the autonomy and integrity of our lives to regain, several million upstarts like myself began fighting fire with fire by launching little farce-missiles right back at Washington D.C. Though for a while our efforts didn’t help much politically, they were immediately therapeutic literarily—because as long as we defied the feds with light hearts, as long as we protested with humor, we were doing our puny but honest best to wrestle the sword of farce away from these humorless enemies of peace and art. 

 

Do you feel the resonance with the spirit of yesterday’s protests? We are descendants of that Abbie Hoffman theatrical spirit, but now endowed with greater clarity, understanding and 50 more years of determination and experience.

 

Thanks to David James Duncan for the reminder that we have been here before. And stay tuned for the next post with some evidence that we have also been here as far back as Julius Caesar, with a suggested end different from Brutus’ solution. 

 

 

Long Hair, No Hair, White Hair and Frontal Lobes

 

My first protest was in 1969 as a freshman in college taking the bus with classmates to the Vietnam War protest in Washington DC. Also in college, I began doing yoga and then later sitting zazen, started playing and listening to jazz, encountered the Orff teacher who would change my life, took my first backpacking trip, took a poetry class about Yeats, Frost and e.e.cummings, toured Europe with the college chorus singing Medieval Masses.  All of these ended up shaping and defining the next 50 + years of my life.

 

I was most definitely part of the “don’t trust anyone over 30” club and over the years gradually saw the problems with youth without fully-developed frontal lobes leading the charge without many elders by our side. As Abbie Hoffman described it (and this quoted in the above book):

 

“We were young. We were arrogant. We were ridiculous. There were excesses. We were brash. We were foolish. We had factional fights.”

 

And then concludes:

 

But we were right.

 

Now me and my other long-haired companions are now white-haired or bald. Yet still we’re out on the streets speaking out for what was right then, what is right now and what will be right forever. People over profits, living in harmony with nature over strip-mined/ slashed/ fracked domination, celebrating the diversity of race, gender, class, sexual preference rather than marginalizing and oppressing those “different” and more. You know the list. Or at least, you should. 

Had Abbie lived long enough to join us in the recent protests, I might have now written:

Now we are old. We are humble. We are dignified. We live moderately. We are confident in our convictions. We are wiser. We are more accepting of each other. 

And we are still right.

 

Third Act

In the last No Kings Rally, my wife’s sign read “Trump is the worst President since Trump.” But now that sign needs to be amended: “Trump is even a worse President than Trump.” 

 

For during the first Regime of 2016, I hated everything about it but assured myself that hope lay in four freedoms more or less intact. When Hitler took power, he immediately shut down freedom of speech, elections, term limits. and the courts. None of that happened wholly in the First Act of Regime 1. Why did and why does that matter?

 

Freedom of speech guaranteed a balancing act whereby people could voice and hear and consider different, opposing, dissenting points of view to the leader’s agenda and not be threatened, punished or shut down. Schools could still teach history from multiple points-of-view, books could be read that raised important questions and exposed the Wizard behind the curtain pulling the ropes of manufactured consent. People could assemble in the streets without fear of undue police violence. All of that made a difference and allowed for some truth to be spoken amidst a blizzard of state-sanctioned and Fox media lies.  

 

Free and fair elections guaranteed that people could still speak with their vote, as they did when Biden defeated Trump in 2020. Despite gerrymandering, dubious voting machine and vote counting, big money buying up advertising space, laws making black people stand in line for hours in the hot sun and laws punishing people who would bring them water, voter registration drives could still make a difference. 

 

Term limits insured that no matter how horrible a leader, the country would only have to endure it for eight years and then there would be hope for a change. The actual history of the ping-pong game between the two parties in my lifetime— Kennedy/ Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan/ Bush, Clinton, GW Bush, Trump, Biden, Trump has helped democracy and justice from going wholly off the rails. This is in direct contrast to dictatorships in Nazi Germany and Italy and current regimes in North Korea, China, Turkey, Iran and beyond.

 

Finally, the institution of the courts gave the possibility that leaders would be held accountable for their actions, that transgression of their Constitutional Oaths held consequences, that overstepping their duties (as in police murdering people) would be punished, that traitorous acts like the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection would land people in jail. 

 

In this Second Act, things have gotten much worse. Consider the signs.

 

1.   The networks cancelling Stephen Colbert. Schools mandated to stop teaching diverse points of view. More books banned. Big money buying up yet more media to serve the fascist agenda. Teachers or employees expressing their opinion about the Charlie Kirk murder getting fired. Two people gathering in the streets of Minnesota to exercise their right to peacefully dissent murdered by ICE agents. The list goes on. 

 

2.   Threats from above to cancel mid-term elections. New voter procedures designed to shut-out voters who disagree with the regime. Plans to have intimidating ICE agents at the polls. The move to ban or limit voting by mail. Continued gerrymandering. 

 

3.   Threats that there will be no election for a third term. 

 

4.   Immunity granted to the Fascist-in-Chief despite being found guilty of felonies on 42 counts. Constant attention-diversion away from the Epstein Files. The January 6^th crew pardoned and released from jail. No accountability for the ICE agent or further police murders. The list goes on. 

 

I’m no political analyst. I’d much rather spend all my mental, emotional and physical energy as a teacher nurturing and cultivating tender young souls to blossom into kind, caring, loving and intelligent future citizens. I’d much rather keep up my little attempt to express myself artistically as a musician. I’d much rather keep digging down to the roots of spiritual promise through meditation and walks in the natural world. But I also recognize that these threats to our well-being and our freedom to pursue things that help rather than harm people are real and can’t be ignored. I have to deal with them and do what it takes to help turn them around. And so do we all.

 

Fresh from witnessing the energy of the third massive No Kings Rally, I feel encouraged that the play is not over. There is a Third Act coming that will shift the drama from a Tragedy, a Farce, a not-funny Comedy, to a story of redemption, rising up, healing and hope. We are all the screenwriters and we’re all needed onstage. Let’s go. 

Report from Jackson

I’m writing this from Jackson, Mississippi, where I gave a workshop yesterday on Jazz at Jackson State and then went to find the No Kings Rally. Jackson has a long history of resistance, the site of the Library Sit-in (1961), the Woolworth’s Lunch Counter Sit-in and the assassination of Medgar Evans (1963), the 1965 protests with 950 mass arrests, the 1966 March Against Fear organized by James Meredith and supported by Martin Luther King, the Jackson State police murders of students Phillip Gibbs and James Green in 1970, 10 days after the murder or 4 Kent State Students. The latter received significant press, but few of us (myself included) were ever aware of the Jackson State tragedy, further proof that the country needed to understand that Black Lives Matter. 

With this history of courageous protest in Jackson, I had high hopes that the No Kings Rally would be large and dynamic. So I was at first disappointed to see that it amounted to some 50 people on a bridge overlooking the freeway. It was in competition with the St. Patrick’s Day parade which drew larger crowds, which felt odd in a place where the Black population makes up 80% of the city. 

 

But as I joined them on the bridge, I noted that there was a pretty constant affirmation from the cars speeding below and honking their horns in a kind of “Amen!” to the signs. I started talking to the first man I met, a beautiful gentle Black man my age who was a retired pastor. We had a moving talk, as he described the protests he remembered as a boy in the 60’s. Medgar Evans was a neighbor he knew personally, his older siblings had been arrested in a protest and he told me with a smile how they sang songs all night in their jail cell and kept the guards awake. As a genuine Christian, he told me in all sincerity that despite 400 years of white folks hating black folks — and his (and my) confusion as to “Why?”— he didn’t hate them back. Then he showed me his sign that spoke his empathy for the two white people murdered by ICE recently in Minnesota. At the end of our conversation, I gifted him with my Jazz, Joy & Justice book to give to his grandchildren. So thought the numbers on the bridge were small, that conversation was profound and I walked away teary-eyed. 

 

This morning I looked for the news of other No Kings Rallies (of course, not highlighted by mainstream press, so I had to depend on Facebook posts) and saw the living sign on Ocean Beach in San Francisco made by 5,000 people. And my wife was one of them! I read about the 200,000 who gathered in Minnesota. About the 3,300 events across 50 states. About the total of some 8 or 9 million people (the largest single-day protest in U.S. history) who took the trouble to step out and say, “Enough!” About protests in other countries and on every continent—some seventeen countries in Europe, six in North America, Colombia in South America, Malawi in Africa, Japan in Asia, Australia in Oceania—and even four people in Antarctica! 

 

The momentum is clear. But still the guy and his cronies are there and in unbelievable defiance of the very cornerstone of democracy, working to shut down fair elections with the Supreme Court’s thumbs-up. Can’t the 9 million people simply go to DC and escort them all out? Just a thought. 

 

Meanwhile, I’m off to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in Jackson before heading off to Memphis. The courage these protestors in the 60’s had in the face of much more severe dangers when resisting, the tactical organization they showed in getting voters registered, the combining of exalted vision with political details and strategies, is mightily impressive. We owe them a great debt and clearly have so much more to do to complete their work. May it be so!