independence day 2019

The late Pete Seeger, champion of the best of America's communitarianism, is said to have wept in grief in the late 60s upon hearing that his favorite Woody Guthrie anthem, "This Land Is Your Land," was hated by First Nations people. A song Seeger had long celebrated and performed suddenly became anathema as yet another example of white privilege. In time, the people's bard found a way to renew his performance of Guthrie's riposte to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." Seeger made certain to saturate future concerts with a host of more intentionally inclusive numbers. Nevertheless, his tears became a turning point - part conscientization, confession, and conversion - as the son of a Harvard professor realized how deeply the legacy of American race hatred, class conflict, loathing of women, homophobia, religious intolerance, and nativism flowed through his own blood. As Coretta Scott King said, "Freedom is never really won. Struggle is a never ending process where every generation must win freedom again."

On Independence Day, July 4, 2019, I can't help but reflect on Seeger's harsh encounter with privilege. We, of the one time real but now rapidly diminishing majority, are experiencing under the current regime what people of color, poverty, and powerlessness have known as everyday reality: atrocity, indignity, despair, anger, impotence, violence, shame, disgust, and fear. Like Seeger, we too should be weeping. We need to know the magnitude of evil that is at work among us and within us. Like the Old Testament scholar, Walter Brueggemann, noted: the work of the prophets of ancient Israel always included grief as part of any resistance to oppression. "By the waters of Babylon," sang the Psalmist, "there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps when our captors and tormentors asked in mirth for songs, saying: sing to us one of your songs of Zion. But how can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land." 

The prophet first calls God's people to face, confront and embrace reality. The way into peace and hope cannot be constructed upon denial and lies. The 12 Step movement's Serenity Prayer expresses this prophetic truth clearly: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." The second prophetic challenge is to fully grieve our shared reality. Until we feel the fullness of its pain, the depth of its despair, and the totality of its poison our heart's will be divided. Conflicted. Holding on to either the promise of privilege or the illusion of magical thinking. Again, to borrow from sisters and brothers who have been to hell and back in AA, "we must hit bottom before we have no more room for stinkin' thinkin'." Reality and grief are essential, writes Brueggemann, because they cleanse us of trusting the status quo. Only then, when we know we are imprisoned by the waters of Babylon, are our imaginations open enough to once again hear God's call: let my people go!

Tears are part of the prophetic journey: without them our hearts and minds will remain divided. But tears are not enough. Not long after the current regime was elected, I was at a meeting of local leaders eager to create public resistance. One friend, an academic, confessed that for the first time in her life she felt both hopeless and afraid. To which another colleague, an African American activist, replied, "Welcome to the facts of my world in America." It was not said with venom or malice. "Just the facts, ma'am." Facts - and tears. 

It is my conviction, therefore, that over the past three years we have been embracing the facts of reality and deep grief. For a while, we held public demonstration after public demonstration. We needed and wanted to do something. Anything. We honestly believed that our protests mattered. And, I suspect that they did in a modest way: they served as a way of preaching to the choir. And that always has a place because choirs have important work to do. And yet at another level I sense our early protests were yet another expression of white, bourgeois privilege: damn it, we have always been able to fix and change problems. So let's hurry up and DO something. But, and I say this with tenderness and solidarity, much of what we did did not matter. Actions in the courts mattered. Organizing for subsequent elections mattered. But not many of our protests born of privilege mattered all that much.

Small wonder so many white people of conscience have run out of gas. Or are experiencing resistance fatigue. Or an exhausted frustration that change is not happening fast enough. We started to face our American reality but have neither grieved enough nor let our hearts become so broken that the sacred imagination might find room to become flesh within us. Like the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel, we have been sitting by the waters of Babylon - and weeping for a while when our tormentors asked us to sing songs of Zion - but we have not become empty and trusting enough to hear the holy whisper, to us "O mortal one, can these dry bones live!" That is, we do not know how to live paradoxically so that we can resist and grieve as well as celebrate and strengthen beauty.

The wise and fiesty souls at ADBUSTERS magazine put it like this: "If we on the left are ever again to be enchanted, ever again to be mysterious, spellbinding, and mythical, we must loosen up, stop intellectualizing, trust our instincts, and learn to play jazz!" Jazz begins with the blues - grief and the reality of hard living are the foundations of jazz - but the music never remains encased in anguish. Rather, jazz listens to the truth and shares it faithfully. It then invites others to share their truths - with vigor - and listens carefully once again. Then jazz brings all of our truths together and playfully mixes them up, changing tempo and timbre with creativity, so that we find new ways to sing the songs of Zion even in captivity. Even in an era when change comes slowly. Even when nobody else around us believes life can be better. Jazz, like nature, asks us to move slowly. Intentionally. Tenderly. Always seeking the beauty even in the midst of our tears.

Take the song "All Blues" by Miles Davis off the best selling jazz record of all time: Kind of Blue. As an instrumental, it is a chill reflection of the blues in both form and groove. To be sure, Davis inverts a few of the "turn arounds" to create something new, but the essence of the composition is classic.

Nearly ten years later, as the American civil rights movement was ascending, Oscar Brown, Jr. wrote lyrics to the Miles Davis masterpiece. These lyrics not only brought the tune into the realm of vocal music - expanding who could share it - but he reframed it as a paean to freedom and a lament over injustice.

The sea, the sky, the you and I
The sea, the sky, for you and I
I'll know we're all blues

All Shades, all hues, all blues

Some blues are sad
But some are glad,
Dark-sad or bright-glad
They're all blues

All shades, all hues, all blues

The color of colors
The blues are more than a color
They're the moan of pain
A Taste of strife
And a sad refrain
A game which life is playin'
Blues can be the livin' dues
We're all a-payin'
Yeah, Oh Lord

In a rainbow
A summer day that's fair
A prayer is prayed
A lament that's made
Some shade of blues is there;
Blue heaven's hue,
They're all blues

Now dig how the great Ernestine Anderson transformed "All Blues" even more: she honors the first story, welcomes the next while adding her own experience into the mix. This is key: knowing the truth, loving it and exploring the possibilities the truth offers at any given moment in time. 

On Independence Day 2019 I say let the fools bring their tanks and planes to the nation's capital. We can name it as folly and narcissism, but let's not be trapped by illusions of privilege. Or despair. Or grandiosity. Rather, let's keep reinventing a culture of resilience that playfully nourishes our souls. To every thing there is a season - and there will come a time again when the seeds we plant now in grief will be raised up in joy. Keep playing your jazz. Keep writing your poems. Keep dancing and praying and feasting, dear friends. This current darkness is not the end of the story.

credits
+ https://medium.com/@nilegirl/white-privilege-lesson-no-2-8d6e5aa9e7d9
+ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/155303887154134098/
+ https://www.amazon.com/Tears-Heartless-Ones-Contemporary-Abstract/dp/B01M15SWKS
+ https://www.tallengestore.com/products/contemporary-abstract-art-tears-internat