Something is happening. Not sure what yet. Words like “transition” sound trite, shallow. After marveling at Boston Harbor and then Baltimore Harbor and a view of what was once a bridge and will be again, I’m starting to write this in Thurgood Marshall Airport.
In the midst of the mess our criminal occupant is making of the world, I’m negotiating a personal uprooting – again. My grownup son and I have lived in upscale suburbia this last year. Lou is heading for California and I’m moving. Not sure where.
I wish Lou would wait a couple of days, as the monster storm is crawling across the southern interstates that would be his route. In a few hours I’ll be in Tampa and below any predictions of snow. The privilege of traveling musician. This is my report from the field. In my travels I am seeing a big movement coalescing. And I’m in front of people preaching we’ve got to get active. So - me too.
My second flight is delayed. Half a century of this has shown me I’m Type B. Instead of getting agitated at it (at least I have no gig tonight) I have permission to let all concerns with appalling news and looming destruction of the Earth go for just a few minutes and look at titles of books or covers of magazines. I can marvel at the inflated prices and pass by. I can sit now in the new beautifully expanded living space between Concourses A and B just opened a little more than a week ago. A refuge rather pleasant, I am lucky to be here. And I can write this.
I love that this airport is named after such a hero, Thurgood Marshall, and though we endure the tenure of his doorstop successor, I can feel a bit of that hope, for the justice we used to think was so close at hand. I have the optimistic premonition that there’s an uprising about to happen - a peaceful one, I hope - and I am wondering about my involvements in a new social circle. (I’ll be letting you know about that).
I wrote in my previous entry here, I want to spend this year making the most of what artistic political leverage I have to affect that looming election in November which will determine our survival. And if you ask me (I’ve written before) we can not fall into divisiveness - the work must be educational and healing. Easy to say.
The other day I heard Martin Luther King (as the usual sources, NPR / PBS, bring him back on his birthday) give his prophetic speech back in 1957 about loving your enemies. I was in elementary school and I remember this. I’ve heard it since, but I got tears in my eyes last Monday. Thurgood Marshall’s legal forces had won the Brown vs Board of Education case integrating schools a couple of years before. Something revolutionary was happening. My life was changed by the courage of people who know the way to win is with love. I didn’t know how to put it together or find any voice of my own for a long while - maybe I have it now.
Marshall’s words, “Democracy just cannot flourish amid fear. Liberty cannot bloom amid hate. Justice cannot take root amid rage,” are often quoted. MLK of course went on to inspire the nationwide movement of non-violence, and people of color taught me to love my enemies. He certainly didn’t invent the idea, but his insistence that there is no future in violence was courageous, and not without controversy.
The other speech I heard: In 1967 MLK got a lot more controversy with his speech linking war in Vietnam, fought by many people of color, with the inequities when the guys come home. They fought like brothers in Vietnam and come home to not being able to live on the same street. In the same year, Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, the first black Supreme Court Justice.
There were “riots” each summer in the 60’s – insurrections against the inhumanity that was the law of the land. I was playing with a band of black and white musicians (Eastman School of Music products) and every high school wanted a band like that. Then I got into the Army Jazz Ambassadors Band in Washington DC and discovered there were separate black and white musician’s unions until that year - the year MLK was murdered. Thurgood Marshall met with President Lyndon Johnson, advising how to deal with civil unrest in the wake of the murder. But he had a different vision of tactics than King, and went on to use the legal process against racism, segregation and move America to live up to it’s promise.
When our touring Army Band was stationed at Ft. Meade, next door to Friendly Airport (then name changed to Baltimore Washington Airport - BWI) and I played cocktail hours at the Sheraton Hotel there, I wouldn’t have imagined it would be named after Thurgood Marshall. That’s a victory I hope no criminal occupant will take away.
I tell him every time I go through there, I hope we are still living up to his revolution. We’ve had some setbacks.
Unitarian Universalists just recently adopted an 8th Principle, we had 7. Not of what you must believe, but principles we think everyone should embrace.
” … to build a diverse, multicultural Beloved Community and dismantle racism and other oppressions in ourselves and our institutions.”
What that means to me is, to engage with that person you least want to engage with. I regret that we, as Americans, as humans, still are afraid to come to love.
Here’s my song about that.
Afraid to Come to Love © 1997 Jim Scott
Longing for that state of grace,
We claim our rights, fight for our place.
Yet we’re afraid to come to love.
Struggle for access and equality,
Poised to turn crisis into opportunity,
Yet we’re afraid to come to love.
Drawn by the conflict, caught in the tide,
Blind to where the cycle ends -
Yielding nothing of the secrets we hold inside
Passing our pain to lovers and friends -
It’s a race no one can win
There’s only a place to begin,
Just surrender the boundaries
and let each other in.
Confront injustice with no regrets,
Yet the more that we struggle the harder it gets,
We’re afraid to come to love.
