October 23, 2015 - Anchorage, Alaska. What a trip it has been these last few months. No great ruminations as I sat back in disbelief and watched the rapid dissolve of American politics, drifted in to poetry and began to write music again. A summer in Alaska was most welcome. Hanging out with Sarah at the House. Dinners and sunshine - all combined for creative time. Read too many novels, but found again my joy in writing prose. More to come on that I hope, more to come... Played a small house show earlier this month in Paciano, Italy for a great group of folks - guests from Alaska, Austin, Carson City and right there in town. Old friend Vonn Marsch joined in with Banjo. Local chef Tonino played a mean mouth harp, and Sarah backed up on vocals and sang too! All in all a great time with new friends Leslie, Jody, Bob, Ruth, Tonino and Alan. Sarah and I decided to make it official to boot!
It has been a great time of reflection on who we are and how we live. I haven't taken the time to write here as I have been troubled by the veneer of freedom that we seem to all operate under. Today, reading a copy of History Today, I saw this quote:
“With an increasing awareness of slave discontent, slaveholders targeted what they perceived as contributing to that restlessness: instruction of reading and writing. Suspicious of slave gatherings and paranoid that literacy could 'spoil’ a slave, they recognized that learned slaves who freed themselves from the shackles of slaveholder-imposed ignorance would be unsuited to a life of perpetual servitude.”
Indeed. It is that last bit: "learned slaves who freed themselves from the shackles of slaveholder-imposed ignorance would be unsuited to a life of perpetual servitude” that has me thinking... It is crystalizing a thought that has been nagging at me for some time, and beginning to influence more and more of my music. We dumb down education, we dumb down news, we dumb down our people, until the slow ossification of the bonds of servitude are not even noticed anymore... When you are overseas, everyone debates and gets what is happening around them it seems. Yet they look in bleary-eyed mystification at us: how can Trump and Carson be at the top of polls? How can the constant and escalating "shout" of our politics be the marker of the great democratic experiment? Where other nations build fair processes, we retard them. How can we claim a fair process when just 158 families dominate American political giving? When on one hand California expands voting rights, while Alabama forces Driver's License requirements to register, then closes DMVs in the counties with the greatest propensity to vote Democratic outside of the cities? More and more likely the rules are rigged here, but other great democracies endure change, grow with it and from it. Not us, it seems.
So where does this leave us? For me, its turned me, oddly, to music and writing and away from political activism. If the system is rigged, you have to learn to move outside of the system. I choose this path. Living a good life, living and sharing that life with good friends, reveling in our human gift and modeling it for others. This seems to me, here at least, to be the path that might work best... What do you think? Tell me, what do you think?