Pete Seeger, May We Be Worthy

Pete Seeger was a huge influence on the 20th century struggle for justice and peace. He epitomized the values of the left and fought for trade unions and against racism at a time when people got killed for taking a stand. He mobilized a successful movement to clean up his beloved Hudson River. Our middle class owes its present numbers to people like Pete who risked much to fight for a living wage for workers. He was a young man during the Great Depression and rode the rails with the hoboes. He sang with and shared the values of the iconic artists who opposed the excesses of “Daddy Warbucks” type capitalists, wars like the Vietnam War, and the racist Jim Crow laws.

He was a beacon of ongoing hope even while, in recent decades, he watched the middle class shrink and inequality grow as the corporations, given more and more power, have destroyed what he and his contemporaries had fought and even died to gain.

History, I fear, may have to record Pete Seeger’s time as the highest period in human evolution. The apex. It was a time of material and moral progress from the thirties to the seventies, as the period during which humanity, given the leisure to reflect and confronted by committed young people, began to become aware of, and to seek, a higher ethical way. We still hold some of these values, but our democracies have been reduced to shams by corporate interests running amok.

Our young people no longer even remember how their standard of living was earned with the blood and guts of those in Seeger’s tradition. Those who hold the last of the secure jobs are now isolated and portrayed as outliers, lazy and unjustly privileged. Good jobs stand out and those who hold them are objects of jealousy and ridicule.

Small wonder, when the media are overwhelmingly part of the established right and owned by the fewer and fewer, richer and richer, rich.

It saddens me to think that the world for which Pete Seeger lived and fought is now surrounded and besieged by interests whose sinister control is, all too quickly, becoming insurmountable. One of my favorite Seeger songs:

If I Had A Hammer

Pete Seeger, R.I.P. Here’s hoping you can find a hammer where you are now. Anyway, it’s now the fight of us who are left behind. May we find leaders like you to guide us through the 21st century. May we not break faith with you. May we be worthy.

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Different Methods of Truth Telling

I guess my style of truth telling is pretty direct and “in your face.” It alienates some people, but gets quickly to the point (admittedly as I see it and thus imperfect).

A friend pointed out recently that there are gentler, artistic ways of presenting truth.

Louise Erdrich’s latest book, The Roundhouse,  is one major subject of her wonderful November interview with Eleanor Wachtel of the CBC Radio’s Writers and Company, aired every Sunday at 3 PM. Erdrich is a Native American writer who writes novels that build awareness of injustice towards native peoples. Here’s the CBC Podcast … Well worth a listen.

Video and music are other vehicles for building awareness. One very touching piece, John Trudell’s Crazy Horse, combines poetry, music and video.  I was gripped by its masterful, solemn  combination of these three native-generated media. Just a snippet from Trudell’s poetry:

Crazy Horse, we hear what you say.
One Earth, one Mother
One does not sell the Earth the people walk upon…

I know that all these types of truth telling have value and all are necessary.

I have used music and video myself. I have written 14 songs and have put three of them so far on my Songs page. I should really work on getting the other 11 up on this site.

I feel that the unprecedented speed of the resource-greedy, multinational, corporate attack on our planet creates an urgent necessity for the direct form of truth telling. There is no time left for a slow brew here.