“When Americans are
in need. Americans pull together and we are one country." President Trump’s words
‘honoring’ victims of September 11th 2001 and the lashings of Irma
and Harvey, have all the tawdry familiarity of last year’s Halloween costume. You
have to feel for comfy politicians faced with yet another random catastrophe
visited on the hoy polloi by the God ‘in whom we trust’. “Mar-a-Lago is fine. Your house got blown away. What can I say?”
What
indeed, when your one ‘America’ is being torn apart by enduring political and
economic forces that make Irma shrivel to a storm in a tea cup? While the
largely white affluent chuckle their way to the bank, prisons burst with
impoverished African Americans. Katrina. Charlottesville. Imposed poverty corroding one third of homes headed by single women.
Four in ten US children living close to or below the poverty line.
Congressional healthcare plans to strip millions of coverage. The lashing winds of desperate silence that
so many of ‘My fellow Americans’ endure daily, without so much as a passing nod
from the presidential motorcade, much less the fulfilment of the tired rhetoric
of, “I pledge allegiance to ... one Nation under God,
indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
The
pledge, composed in 1892 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s
catastrophic invasion of the New World, betrays every ‘American’ into routine
hypocrisy and denial. For today’s Selfie
Society, where the average US person lives about 500% beyond global justice, is
the (un)natural outcome of a system based on exactly opposite values, on profound
divisions of race, gender and class, where liberty is for the predators and
justice for the powerful few.
For
me, a conservative white male Catholic, cosy conventionalism was forever
disembowelled by 911. Not ‘America’s’
911, but the 911 of Margarita and Gabriel. Refugees. Refugees betrayed,
tortured and exiled during the first ghastly act of terrorism on that fateful
date: the Kissinger/Nixon/Pinochet coup in Chile, 911 1973, overthrowing the
elected government of Dr. Salvador Allende. The power of music is astonishing. These
refugees sang to us, above all the songs of their just-butchered compañero, the
great and greatly-loved Víctor Jara. And where we had preached distant cold
charity, suddenly warm justice stood among us, strong and vibrant. For Víctor
unmasked the hypocrisy. He sang of the impoverished children, of murdered
miners, of peasants with their skins burned black. All victims of that original
systemic ravening greed that tore the ‘land of freedom and democracy’ from its
first nations, that fattened itself on slavery, tobacco, sugar, invasions and
proxy wars, and, a cancer unleashed, that was even then beginning to gnaw its
way through the very sinews of the planet from which we all draw life.
Therefore,
“It
was in the cold dark stadium, they swore they’d beat him down.
They
broke his wrists and fingers, saying, ‘Sing now! – if you can.’”
Last
night, September 11th 2017, we had a wonderful celebration of life.
Singing Víctor. Not just me, an old relic from those distant days, but a host
of young musicians, an eager audience of mostly young Nicaraguans, singing,
dancing, laughing, re-committing to the great dream.
“But
his love, his song, his courage, no Kissinger could fight
And I thought I heard sweet Víctor, singing
in the night:
‘Don’t
give up, don’t give up, don’t give up the struggle now.
Keep on singing out for justice, don’t give
up the struggle now!’”
Margarita
used to quote Che’s, “Above all, always be
capable of feeling deeply any injustice committed against anyone, anywhere in
the world. This is the most beautiful quality in a revolutionary.” Which, naturally, brings us to Beethoven.
In
these global warming days we all pay lip service to the notion that ‘We humans are all one people’.
Beethoven, that deaf, irascible, soaring, profoundly revolutionary, genius
believed it with all his soul. And, like Víctor, he poured his belief into his
music, into its profound silences which liberate us from, and to be, ourselves,
and, most clearly, into his universally-beloved, ‘Ode to Joy’. It’s an astonishing melody, even little guys
in our barrio can hum it, and when I sing my way down the road, people smile.
In choosing the text to set to music,
Beethoven was very precise. His ‘Joy’ is
joy expressly as the bringer of universal sister and brotherhood. But, just
as the origins of today’s hyper-consumerist Mother’s Day in Julia Ward Howe’s
searing call for peace after the US Civil War were quickly bought over, so we
Starbucks revolutionaries usually prefer to ‘turn
our heads, pretending we just don’t see’.
“O
Joy, where your gentle wings hover,
Peace and brotherhood will reign.”
Today,
with its rampant fear and racism, its sexism and catastrophic consumerism, this
is all completely beyond the politicians/military/corporations/1%ers. They will
never save life on Earth.
And us, hoy polloi? Well, right now, with
the drunken soldiery, we’re packed into Zola’s hurtling, driverless train, heading
headlong to certain crushing death, Unless. Unless? Unless, ‘We, the Peoples’ of
this one, exquisite, and exquisitely fragile, planet take it back. Now. All of which, naturally again, brings us to
the ‘Great Global Hum’. This has been labelled, ‘crazy’, ‘quixotic’, and worse.
Yet some of my most trusted and sober friends say, ‘That’s a wonderful idea!’ Let
us know what you think. Here’s the gist, details: http://paulbaker2004.wixsite.com/windyday
We Are the Earth - No More Alan Kurdis! Look at your hands
as you type. Individual fingers working in astonishing, essential,
harmony. Precisely because of that exquisite harmony, they are our most
wonderful tools. Exactly so, our wonderful Earth - all life essentially interconnected.
Exactly so, also, us humans, ‘We, the Peoples’ have only one planet. Just as
our hands, we are essentially one people. In today’s reality
of fear, hatred and drowned refugee children, we are determined to make that
reality real, teaching the whole world to sing, “We Are the Earth” ‘in perfect
harmony’, climaxing next Earth Day (April 22), beginning now. Why?
š To flood the planet
with beauty, inspiration and hope.
š To transform our
profound frustration and outrage into powerful, sustained action, linking
together as many individual projects and movements as possible to create a
peace-filled, just and re-greened Earth.
š To require our
employees, the hugely wasteful military, worst polluters on Earth, to
re-dedicate at least 3% of their resources (especially creative lives) to that
regreening and to bringing pure water to all. So achieving environmental
justice and averting catastrophic wars over this, the heart blood of all living
things.
Crazy? No. Realistic. Catastrophic floods
in Texas/India/Nepal. Killer hurricanes in Mexico/US/Barbuda: One Planet,
One Peril. ONE Planet, ONE People! How else can
we cope with global warming? The
military/corporations/politicians/1%ers will never heal Earth, especially since,
just when she needs the best of us, the inmates have taken over. We, the
PeopleS, must take our planet back. There is no-one else.
Together, we freed Nelson Mandela; we stopped Vietnam. We sang ‘We
Are the World’ for Africa. We will sing ‘We
Are the Earth’ for and with the whole world. We, the PeopleS,
will have no more Alan Kurdis.
Quixotic?
You bet. But then I sing
“Stand up and see the wonder of
the mountain
Source of the sun the water and the wild wind
You who can harness the rush of
mighty waters
You who with the seed sow the
longings of your soul
Stand up and see these hands with
which we labour
Stretch out, grow tall, hands
joined with your sisters and your brothers
Working together, by deepest
blood united.
Knowing, together, the future can
be now!” (Víctor Jara, Plegaria a un Labrador)
And
I laugh again at Margaret Thatcher’s "Anyone
who thinks that Nelson Mandela will ever be free is living in cloud-cuckoo
land." I listen again to Mandela
himself, that afternoon in Los Angeles, just four months after his cloud cuckoo
release, thanking us for the ‘countless
small steps’ that have led us here today. Together.’ Together, that’s the key. ONE planet. ONE
People. El pueblo unido jamás será
vencido!
As
a trans-galactic JFK might’ve said, “So,
my fellow Earthlings, ask not what your planet can do for you – ask what you
can do for your planet.” Welcome to
cloud cuckoo land, Folks!
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