"So What Now?" (May 2011)

The real world reverses the writing process, and inspires reflection on respect and dignity.

Songwriting is the art and craft of translating the personal into the universal. To take one's experiences and perspectives and try to make them emotionally accessible to the many. Most of the time that is how I approach these musings as well.

But life often intervenes in grand and sweeping ways that cannot be ignored. I was already a bit preoccupied with the super tornadoes across the south as well as ongoing developments in Japan and the "Arab spring". When the news came of the capture and demise of Osama bin Laden, like probably everyone else I was immediately drawn back into the whole 9/11 bad dream.

So I re-read my first journal entry post 9/11. It wasn't until November 2001 that I felt sufficiently stable to organize and share my thoughts, inspired by a visit to Valley Forge. History is a great teacher, but it is in the hands of the student what will be learned. There must be some cosmic irony to bin Laden and Hitler sharing a death anniversary.

So my thoughts this week have been largely about the future - what happens now? Is this good? Is this progress? I'm sure it is too soon to tell. We remain a nation split asunder, seemingly all but taking up arms over the wide gulf of our disagreements. Our most decidely uncivil wars of words and ideas remain as fiery and, dare I say often hateful, as ever. My friend Mary Byrd Brown invoked Shakespeare when describing political conversations of opposing viewpoints as "simultaneous soliloquies"; indeed, how rarely do we even slightly reshape each other's views with polite words or heated ones.

As a human being and as an artist, our aversion to finding common ground remains troubling and distasteful, but such is the state of things in our great alliance of states. The lack of dignity and respect in our public discourse and behind the anonymity of online chatter is appalling, but not at all new.

Respect and dignity are big moral concepts. Words we embrace in theory, but in practice much harder to live by. The seven tenets of the Unitarian faith begin with "the inherent worth and dignity of all living beings". Which means no exceptions for terrorists, child-killers, politicians, or invasive weeds in my garden. I am far from truly embracing that tenet, even if I do aspire to be closer to it.

Life is a pretty complicated and complex set of circumstances and beings acting out their parts within them, even as our understanding of how they all interact evolves. The older I get, the less neatly anything fits into neat geometric containers, or even shades of black and white. As a human being, that complex world has again superimposed its confounding conundrums and uncertainties upon my little life once again. As a songwriter, I suppose I have a new load of grist for the mill. Time will tell how it all plays out. All I can do is respect the process, and the work.