Guest Editorial

The author Cleve Jones spoke at the recent No Kings Rally in San Francisco and while I feel impatient with the well-meaning speakers who shout and harangue (not dissimilar to the chain saws doing necessary brush-trim, but assaulting me in our little country retreat), I deeply appreciated his well-chosen but straight-to-the-heart-of -the-matter words spoken with both calm and deep conviction. I share it here.

 

Hello and thank you all for being here.

 

The pronouns I use the most are the ones probably understood the least by those in the White House today. They are WE, US and OURS. We are in this together. And it is up to us to be the leaders we need to save our country and our democracy.

 

We come to this place this afternoon from many separate journeys. Our ancestors travelled different paths. But all our parents and grandparents and great grandparents and those before them - set their feet upon long and often difficult roads that converge here today, at this critical moment in the history of our nation and humankind.

Among us today are descendants of the original peoples of this land and all those who came here, not to conquer or colonize, but simply to live. Refugees and asylum seekers. Ordinary people who fled war and famine and poverty and repression. People who have always asked for nothing more than the right to live and work and love and care for their families in freedom, with justice. They came to America in search of a dream that has always fallen short, always been flawed, remains incomplete and yet still inspires hope across the world. 

 

We know the history of this land and its peoples. Those forced to walk the trails of tears. Those brought here in chains against their will and those who gladly gave all they possessed to get here. Those who arrived in overloaded ships to live in tenements and slums. Those who walked across the southern deserts. Those who endured Jim Crow and the nights of terror. All those who suffered and dreamed and sacrificed – not to some dreadful god of greed and retribution but for their children and their children’s children. For our future. For us.

 

That dream – of what a nation by and for the people could be – is now threatened more deeply than any time since war tore our nation apart in the Spring of 1861, claimed the lives of almost a million Americans, and opened wounds that fester to this day. A fascist regime has taken power. Their billionaire cronies are further enriched. Working people are denied health care. Protections of our land and water and air are abandoned, as are freedom of speech and due process. Grift and cruelty and racism are celebrated. Women are denigrated and denied control of their bodies. Sexual and gender minorities are demonized. The military is deployed in American cities to combat fictional foes. Masked and unidentified thugs terrorize and abduct immigrants and native-born alike. 

They threaten sovereign nations from Denmark to Venezuela to Canada with war and invasion. They control much of the media, the voting systems of 27 states, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House but blame Democrats for the shutdown of our government while they continue to build prisons and detention camps across the land. They did not come to govern; they came to destroy. And they claim we are the ones who hate America.

 

Almost all of us use devices every day that link us to platforms that have become our primary means of communication – where we learn the news, connect with each other and plan every aspect of our personal, professional and political lives. And every one of those devices and platforms are owned and operated by men who dined at the White House just six weeks ago and lavished the President with praise. 

 

My friends, the peril before us is grave and the danger to our lives and liberty is very real. The beast is at the door. The hinges are strained. The locks are sprung. The frame is splintered and creaking. 

 

And yet. 

And yet.

And yet we rise.

We do not despair. We will not surrender, and we will not comply. This is our country.

 

Every one of us here, and all those marching in our millions across the land today, all of us have a role to play as we meet the awful challenge of this crisis. What is the special skill you will bring to this struggle? How will you build the offline networks necessary to organize and build this movement beyond today? Which are the communities and neighborhoods you can organize and defend? What will you do to strengthen labor unions, academia, the courts and other institutions of a free and democratic society? 

 

What will you do to imagine and launch and sustain the massive campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience and non-cooperation that history informs us is now required?

 

Look to your hearts and find the abiding strength that dwells there. Look to the sky and all the magnificent beauty that surrounds us still. Look to those who stand proudly at your shoulders. Look to your ancestors and claim your future.

 

We are the people.

 

Now is the time.

 

Life in the Country

 

I settled into the bench on the porch of a most lovely house in the charming town of Bolinas. Cypress trees surrounding me, the distant hills inviting me to come up and walk, the beckoning beach around the corner. I had driven up Route 1 in Marin Country dazzled by the beauty of the day, the views of the sparkling ocean to my left and open farmlands to my right, driving up the winding road serenaded by Keith Jarrett playing an exquisite jazz ballad. I thought of all the unknown people who worked to preserve the exquisite beauty of this place, saved it from developers and chain stores and high-rises and thanked them in my heart. 

 

It’s our annual Men’s Group retreat, though we actually haven’t done one since 2019 and it was in this very house. Eight men, two declining because of challenging health issues, with bodies quite different from our 1990 versions when we started, but character and spirits mostly the same. We all had come together two days earlier for the No Kings Rally and that felt good— our like-minded values regarding social justice matched with our willingness to take to the streets. 

 

On the way in to Bolinas, I stopped at the Bolinas-Stinson school and taught a jazz class to 22 8^thgraders. This was no spontaneous drive-by-teaching— I had set it up with an Orff teacher who had studied with me in the Levels Course in Carmel Valley, the Jazz Course in San Francisco and Orff Afrique in Ghana. No surprise, I loved working with the kids who were willing to be playfully silly, hard-working when they couldn’t master a musical part right away and surprising others and themselves with some inspired improvisations. I’m loving my Johnny Appleseed life of sowing musical and humanistic seeds wherever I go, whenever I can. 

 

On to lunch and some post-lunch “free time” before we agreed to walk on the beach. That’s when I settled on the bench with my journal and pen, ready to absorb the peace of life in the country. And that’s when the chain saw started whining and howling, the generator for the taco truck kicked in, the trucks came roaring by on the road below. Sitting on Broadway in New York would have been more peaceful! Certainly sitting on my deck in San Francisco is much quieter. I actually recorded the din and if I could play it for you on the Blog, I think you’d be astounded. But if you live in the “country” or even the suburbs, with leaf-blowers blowing, chain saws screeching, food-trucks droning, you wouldn’t be surprised.

 

Once again, my current read This Is Happiness has something to say on the matter. People are gathered together listening to a man try to sell them the marvels of machines that electricity brought to the village will bring. Now keep in mind that I appreciate my washer and dryer (though also okay hanging clothes on the line), am grateful for how quickly I can process thought, store it and share it on this computer (though I wrote my first books on a manual typewriter), am happy to preserve food in my refrigerator. But I do believe that no labor-saving device ever saved anyone labor— up to a point. The fact is that hunter-gatherer societies and even today people living simple lives have much more leisure than the harried modern person enslaved by our devices and rushing here and there from one meeting to another. At any rate, here’s the passage. (Moylan is the salesman making his pitch):

 

Moylan said the first law of engineering was to make the world a better place. (He didn’t state the second law, that without exception everything that was engineered would one day break down, that sometimes and usually one day after each machine had become indispensable to  living, the machine would abnegate all responsibility and not turn on; you’d press its red button and it would just sit there looking at you, and you’d press the button a second time as thought excusting it that one time it had forgotten its job and forgotten that its whole purpose was to serve this one simple function, and you’d press the red button again and an absolute nothing would happen, a less-than-nothing, a minus action because it would seem you were in a worse-off place than nothing happening because now not only had you forgotten how you lived before but you had to find a service man… and oh, there might be one coming next week, definitely the week after that, or the following and meanwhile, you kept pressing the red button because maybe today after the bit of a rest you never know it might turn on and when it didn’t, when you’d tried the pressing combined with a small shove, with a more serious shove, with a shake, descending through the whole sorry declension until you’d arrived at a kick, when the stubbornness of the stupid machine seemed so defiant as to not only lower the flag on the flagpole of manhood but take the flagpole too, sundering marriages by the blank white stare of an unwashing washing machine, any number of men, and some women, would choose to have a go at it, going with the crude iron tools of an earlier time and a zero knowledge, the guts of the machine spilled on the floor and the red button somewhere over there by the time the service man came in the door with his sponsored smile. “Is she giving you a bit of trouble?” taking a good gander at the Homemade devastation before nodding slowly and telling you the third law: “Afraid this is going to cost you a fair bit.” The fourth soon after:” I haven’t the part with me.”

 

Well, there you go. Then there’s the 5^th law: “They don’t make that part anymore. Afraid you’ll have to buy a new one.” Then the 6^th one: “Want to have a peaceful sit on your country house’s porch? Listen to the birds and the rustle of the leaves in the breeze and the lapping of the waves? You can, but only in the 5 seconds before the next round of the chainsaw, re-booting the generator, hoping no trucks will pass by. 

 

Can’t wait to get home to the peace of city life. 

 

Alone Together

Amidst all the reasons to put “Go to protest rally” on your to-do list, the first one is to shock you out of your sense that you are carrying the pain of the world alone. Yes, you can get a sense that others feel similar things reading posts on social media or articles or books. But you don’t really know it viscerally in your bones until you show up and feel the energy of 50,000 people gathered together. The understandable despondency and despair and hopelessness we feel with each new assault reported in the mainstream media—Poof! Vanished in a flash. It will come back, for sure, and understandably so. But in that moment of gathering, you feel the tangible power of the group mind carrying the vibration of care and compassion.

 

My first rally yesterday was at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, where a few thousand spelled out with their bodies the message above. I was standing at the wall observing them when someone cranked up John Lennon singing Imagine. As he sang, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one,” I pointed out to the people on the beach and thought, “You got that right, John!”

There were an estimated 2,600 different rallies across the U.S.— and more internationally in places like Korea and Ireland!— and an estimated 7 million people who took time out of their day to make it clear: “Not in my name.” 7 million! It was the largest known protest in the history of our country!

 

There’s more good news. I’ve been at protests since 1969 and often the dominant energy has been anger and the dominant action is confrontation with police. A lot of ugly (though deserved) name calling from the marchers to the soldiers or police paid to defend the undefendable. In my time the issues included the violation of civil rights, Vietnam war atrocities, homophobia, nuclear arms buildup, the Iraq war, police brutality and murder, women’s rights, environmental destruction. Now with this regime, the issues are equally undefendable and the consequences as serious. But with the growth of our collective frontal lobes, our gradual understanding that violence begets violence no matter how justified it seems, the whole tone of these rallies has changed. There is humor and whimsy and dancing and inflatable animals and an overall life-affirming spirit without diminishing one iota the seriousness of these threats to our democracy. For those brainwashed by the Fox News rhetoric, it’s just possible that it might be hard for them to take seriously the term “terrorists” applied to elder women playing ukeleles, the word “vermin” thrown out to describe the kind nurse who helped you, the lovely teacher who cares for and about your child, the grandparents holding their homemade sign up while sitting in their wheelchair. 

And another milestone. Not a single arrest, damage to property or act of violence. We were prepared to be taunted by MAGA plants or counter-protestors, but they never came. And if they had, we were ready to not engage, stay calm and march on. 

 

Well into his 90’s, our elder patriot statesman Noam Chomsky modeled how to resist with relentless intelligence. When asked by a student how to change the world, he would smile and say, “Start by noticing who benefits when you stop paying attention.”

 

The people wreaking havoc on our world have indeed benefitted enormously (monetarily, at least—we’ll see what St. Peter has to say to them), but now 7 million plus are starting to pay attention. The tide is turning. We are no longer alone. We are alone together.*

 

* Also the name of a great jazz tune.

Open Letter to AOSA

(AOSA stands for the American Orff Schulwerk Association, the parent organization for music teachers like me. My intention here is not to air dirty laundry or point fingers, but to show how the ideas and practices mentioned here are infecting all our organizations and the way we think about sharing life together on this planet. Hope you find something that resonates.)

When confronted with injustice, I ask four types of questions:

 

1.    Who was hurt by this and how can I help them?

2.    What are the principles and values that stand, often invisibly, behind a hurtful action? How do they make good people do bad things? 

3.    What are the even larger issues behind the principles that often work without our awareness of how they contribute to the damage?

4.    How can we reconcile the conflicts between our intentions and the results that arise in all the dynamics above? Might it be simply a matter of weighing how much of each is needed and healthy and even more importantly, order them into foreground and background?

 

Like a physical disease in the body, this in-depth kind of analysis is essential to proper treatment. If we focus solely on what happened minus all the forces that drove it and continue to damage the organism, it’s a bit like prescribing ibuprofen for a brain tumor. Temporary relief, perhaps, but not getting to the root of the problem.

 

For example, the role of the lawyer in contemporary life. I think most everyone these days understands the need to have the safety net of the law when human relations flounder. But when that net becomes the ground we walk on, things go bad. When lawyer-speak is our primary language of discourse and lawyer-thought the North Star of how we navigate our lives, something begins to rot in the state of Denmark. I believe the compliant acceptance of this as the new reality in all our institutions is one of the big issues behind the issues, the unseen and unnamed driver at the wheel that has us careening into each other like bumper cars in a carnival. 

 

All of the above is much on my mind lately with a real-life situation— an institution I belong to and people I know. While grappling with these complex, thorny issues, I was astonished to read this passage from a book titled This Is Happiness. This remarkable novel, set in a small village called Faha in Ireland, has a main character named Noe, who as a young man, has a life-threatening accident helping the community set up poles to bring electricity to them. 

 

While he’s recovering in his home, a man named Rushe comes in and without a single word asking him how he’s doing, starts straight in talking his lawyerlike talk to make it clear that his company will not be liable for his accident, questioning the afflicted Noe like a grueling lawyer in a major trial. Here’s how Noe describes: 

 

“It's hard not to despise officialdom in all forms. The retreat of human beings behind it diminishes the nature of what we are. I’ve never known a man or woman to be better for the wearing of the uniform. I’ve known them to be different, but not more human. …

 

When Rushe appeared in my grandparents’ house, he brought with him more than his person. In his manner, he brought the State and in doing so, in his standing there, squat, rigid and bull-headed, in his use of a tone and language hitherto unknown inside the stone walls of that crooked house, an easier and more natural way of living was nearing its end. In Faha, and places like it, people had been making it up as they went along and making it up out of no rule book but the one they had been born with, that is an innate sense of right and decency, the rough edges of how to live alongside others having been knocked off not by ordinance or decree but by life. …

 

…the role he was assigning me, I would not serve. There in the kitchen, I felt the stirring of a family trait I hadn’t realized I possessed until right then, but which would inform the kind of life I would end up living, that is, what authority provoked in me was a desire to be an outlaw. 

 

This speaks directly to a controversy afoot in AOSA. It feels like this unthinking agreement to Rushe’s way of thinking is leaking in everywhere— our schools, our neighborhoods, our nation— and diminishing our capacity to be authentic human beings, allows us to barge right into a house talking about liability protection without even asking the person hurt how they’re doing. Our long history as music teachers speaking with a tone and language that once was musical instead of flat and monotone, our delight in making things up as we went along trusting our instincts, is now reduced to committees and rubrics and long overly-complicated documents. We’re losing the ability to just sit down and talk to each other. Afraid to have any real, pleasurable or courageous conversation without worrying if we’re ticking all the right pre-ordained boxes. 

 

I feel its toxic presence in every aspect of our organization— the way we’re handling the apprenticeship program, conference proposals, diversity issues, board decisions. We’re losing the ability to act and think from an artistic way of looking at the world. Knowing how to hold dissonance like an intriguing chord, understanding how to move the half-steps that resolve to consonance. Crafting opposing voices into complementary relationships that create a melodious counterpoint. Using the tension of rhythmic 3’s and 2’s to make a dynamic polyrhythm. There is no artistry in a lawyer’s brief. Just the paint-by-number steps that leave out imagination and lead to the deadly dullness of a pre-fabricated result.

 

To switch metaphors. As the old guy who has been around the block many times in the AOSA neighborhood, it feels like we’re tearing down the old, colorful, unique houses and making generic practical houses that all look alike, with no aesthetic ornamental features, vibrant colors, unique contours. The once “crooked houses” with the warm kitchens giving out heat and enticing smells are now “efficiency units” run by faceless electronic entities. 

 

In so many places, our “easier and more natural way of living is nearing its end” and I, for one, am deeply saddened that AOSA is becoming one of them. The rubrics they are assigning to me, I refuse to serve. The compliance they prefer over the questioning will not be mine to give. I will leave the too-tight shoes they ask me to wear outside the class and stride in boldly carrying forth my teacher Avon’s “barefoot connections.” Likewise, his “possibility teaching,” where we make things up as we go along and trust our instincts to be both extravagantly and artistically wild as well as kind and decent. 

 

No ’drawing-board mentality,” warned Carl Orff. “Don’t Fence Me In!” said Cole Porter. “God Bless the Child,” said Billie Holiday and children, bless their hearts, trust their intuition over the adult’s baffling rules. These are the qualities that drew me into the Orff approach and got me happily playing in its fields for 50 years. They mostly have been—and should be—the North Star of how we think and act and now are clouded over. We now navigate wholly by GPS.

 

Be it in AOSA or any institution, when the law serves to constrict us in its straightjacketed thinking, shut us down, feed our fears, demand our blind obedience, I will happily stand outside the law and proudly wear the mantle of out-law. Then ride off into the sunset with my fellow outlaws, determined to live true and free in the wide-open spaces under the immense stars. I will be beholden to no one out of duty to the roles others assign us, beholden to everyone out of finding our common ground of artistic vision, extravagant imagination and simple kindness and decency.

 

If need be, I’ll ride off alone into the sunset. But I’d rather hear the music of all of AOSA’s clattering hooves side-by-side. Hi-o-Silver!

"You Haven't Lived Until…"

It was another glorious music session at my beloved Jewish Home for the Aged, where I have played piano and sung every Friday (that I’m in town) since 2008. Seventeen years of playing old jazz standards for folks who heard them on the radio while courting, of playing recognizable classical pieces that found their way into movies and even TV (the Lone Ranger’s William Tell Overture by Rossini, Alfred Hitchcock’s Funeral March for a Marionette by Gound, etc.). Sometimes I’ve brought my guitar and sung old folk songs they may have sung in elementary school—The Erie Canal, Red River Valley, Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and so on. 

 

But yesterday, in honor of today’s march, I did something I had never done. I played and we sang protest songs from the 60’s. Things like If I Had a Hammer, Down by the Riverside, We Shall Not Be Moved. They knew the songs and were in the spirit! I got the feeling that this was familiar territory and imagined them as younger protestors. Who knows? But they were singing with great gusto and smiles.

 

I imagine all of us have our own endings to the sentence that begins “You haven’t lived until…” People might say things like:.

… you’ve bungee-jumped or sky-dove.

… you’ve seen the Aurora Borealis in Alaska.

…you’ve hiked to Machu Picchu. 

 

And so on. 

 

My list is often things like:

…you’ve sung Free at Last with 4-year-olds and had a passionate kid sing a solo.

…you’ve sung I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free with elementary-age students. 

…you’ve performed at the Mozarteum in Salzburg with 17 Middle School kids with 800 music teachers from around the world in the audience.

 

And so on.

 

But now I have a new one to add.

… you’ve sung We Shall Overcome with 25 eighty/ninety-year olds and watched Jesse, a beautiful elder black woman, sing with her eyes closed with the most beatific expression on her face. 

 

As often happens with me with the song, I couldn’t sing and weep at the same time. And that was a first— saying goodbye to them (until next Friday) in-between my sobs. I shall hold their image in my mind as I take to the streets today, guitar in hand, hopefully to get the people around me singing. In-between the chants:

 

“What do we want?!!!”

“Neighborhood sings!!!”

“What do we want?!!!”

“ (clap) No kings!!!”

 

PS And speaking of Neighborhood Sings, immediately after the Jewish Home, I gathered with the neighbors who I led in song during the pandemic. Now we meet three or four times a year, the kids who were 3 and 7 now 8 and 12. We sang through our Halloween repertoire and then moved on to the above (and more) protest songs. It was lovely—even better than bungee jumping! 

Small Islands of Coherence

 

Sharing this on Facebook, I wrote:

 

"Far from equilibrium" is the understatement of the year regarding this present moment, all of us awash in a purposefully manufactured sea of chaos. The world is waiting of us to create those "small islands of coherence" to shift it all to a higher order. And that's why it's so crucial that everyone gather this Saturday in the No Kings Rallies nationwide to beat back the tsunami of chaos and cruelty. Please show up! And get your friends on board!

 

And so, dear reader, whoever you are and wherever you may be, I hope you take this to heart. Cancel watching your child’s soccer game—or better yet, get the whole soccer team to give up the game and come to your local rally! It’s such a small commitment to take two hours out of your day to show up and as of now, not dangerous or life-threatening to register your protest in the street. 

Your presence, multiplied by a similar decision from millions of people nationwide, is a vote for the future of democracy, of a future for your children. You don’t have to carry a sign or shout the chants or wear a frog costume or join the naked bike riders (see news about Portland if you haven’t already) — just show up and feel what it’s like to be with others in a small island of coherence amidst the chaos. I guarantee you will leave refreshed, uplifted and determined to renew your hope and resistance. 

 

Yes? 

Fire Drill

Waking up to an alarm in the dark, walking out the door with my recorder in hand and getting in the car to drive to work—it was like the old days for this retired teacher! But instead of the 20-minute drive to The San Francisco School, it was an hour and eight- minute commute to the Almedan Country Day School in San Jose. I agreed to spend a morning with 3^rd and 5^th graders and their teachers, teaching one class, observing two others. 

 

Since retirement, I’ve continued to do some level of work with kids at some five different schools in San Francisco and another 10 schools worldwide. So it wasn’t as if this was an entirely novel experience in these last five years. But it had been some six months since I set foot in a school and so there was a sense of returning home to my natural habitat. The buzz of kids passing in the halls, the squeals of kids playing in the yard, the murmurs of kids coming into the music class wondering what adventure awaited them. For this 50-year teacher, this is where I thrive and feel utterly at home.

 

I observed one class each from my host teachers and both were delightfully. Lovely rapport with the kids, good development of the material, clear organization within the lesson and both teachers thoroughly enjoying themselves. I got to teach my classic Intery Mintery to a group of 3^rd graders with various admin and teachers watching. I began with another chant that invites the kids to make different kinds of jack-o-lantern faces and then invited the teachers to do it while the kids watched. I believe the children were thoroughly delighted to see their principal make a distorted scary face!

Then back to the kids and I led them through chanting, singing, making motions and playing a challenged six-part piece on the xylophones. They did a great job and when it was time to go, one said “Aww! Do we have to?”

 

During the last class, there was a fire drill and here I was wholly back in the school environment. Out silently to the yard waiting for the “All clear!”, the kids playing silent clapping games to pass the time while waiting. 

 

Next week, I’m going on a short Men’s Group retreat up in Bolinas an hour north and knowing the music teacher who works in that small town, will do a guest class with her 8^th grade. A few days later, I’ll go to a local elementary school to sing Halloween songs, a place I’ve gone every few months or so for the last four years. Then up to Portland to visit the grandkids and another Halloween sing at my grandson’s school and yet another as the school of some college friends’ grandkids. No money involved (though sometimes, yes!), just this happy forever music teacher looking for opportunities to return to his natural habitat. And if I’m lucky, maybe there’ll be a fire drill to make feel even more at home!