No Time for Singing

The gap between what is and what could and should be yawned yet wider yesterday. My wife and I had dinner at some ex-neighbor’s house last night, a couple with two girls and in many ways—as they themselves put it— an earlier version of ourselves. We share the experience of two daughters, having lived on 2^nd Avenue (they moved just a 10-minute walk away), have a mutual love and passion for Golden Gate Park (she wrote a kid’s book about the ABC’s of Golden Gate Park and was instrumental in keeping the JFK road car-free), enjoying camping with the family and share a commitment to raise kids as appliance-free-as possible. This was the family that suggested the pandemic neighborhood sing I led and continue to do four years later every few months. 

Their children, now in 2^nd and 5^th grade, go to a lovely alternative public school and some two years ago, I suggested I come to do guest singing in their daughter’s classes. I did and after the 5^th grade class, I got this note from this student that I had never met before and only spent that 30 minutes singing with. 

Of course, that note is not about me, but translates to: “Thanks for giving me something that I needed that made me so happy.”

 

But the last time I was scheduled to sing, the 5^th grade teacher—herself very enthusiastic about my visits and supportive— said that she couldn’t take 30 minutes out of her day because the kids had state tests coming up. Last night, I again suggested to my friends that I could sing tomorrow on Earth Day and was told that again, there was testing and the teacher was stressed out to the maximum and in fact, there wasn’t 30 minutes to spare anytime between now and the end of school. 

 

There you have it. I’m reminded of the joke of the pious man who came every day to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem three times a day for 45 years to pray. When asked what he prayed about, he replied: “That all religions finally understand that they have different names for the same God, that children respect their parents, that parents create a loving home for their children, that we humans stop fouling our environmental nest, that we stop telling the stories that keep the “isms” alive, etc.” When asked how it felt to be praying for those same things over all those years, he was unequivocal:

 

“Like I’m talking to a fuckin’ wall!”

 

All these posts about the schools we could have and should have and for what? This is a progressive school in San Francisco! And the teacher feels under so much pressure she can’t give the kids a 30-minute respite to sing joyfully. (Which, by the way, would be a brilliant strategy to re-charge their system and help prepare them to take any test the state throws their way.) It’s extraordinary to think that the monster of “testing” is still loose in the land, that ferocious beast that has absolutely nothing to do with children learning what they need to know in the way they need to learn it and know it. This good teacher suffering from stress because of people in the state who live and work far away from her children and know nothing about who they are and what they need and care nothing about either— well, that’s not healthy. She will pass that stress on to the kids, who did nothing to deserve it and the stressed kids will bring their anxiety back into their homes and again, it’s a Lose-Lose-Lose situation that we keep doing—for what, exactly?

 

And in case you’re not up on the current research, read Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture to look at the links between chronic stress and autoimmune diseases, depression, inflammation, cancer, diabetes, heart disease and yet more. But we don’t need medical research to tell us that stress debilitates us, leads us into a state of distress, feeds our anxiety, cripples our sense of self-worth and effective functioning. In short, the polar opposite of what singing together offers us.

 

No time to sing? Think again.