Part III: Conclusion — Music to March To:
Armies march on their stomachs. Social movements for change march in tune to the music in their heads, to the music its members make together. The labor movement had an entire catalogue of songs to sing that defined and inspired it. I remember singing “we shall not, we shall not be moved …” marching on strike on a picket line in 1976 with my 1199 brothers and sisters in front of Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. The civil-rights movement had many if not more, some drawn from the black church, others written by folk singers — Pete, where are you now? I don’t know how many times I sang “We Shall Overcome” on how many picket lines, the most recent memorable time in 2008, the day after Obama was first elected, when my fifty staff members and I, hands clasped in a circle, sang it in thanksgiving.
And the Rolling Stones, the bad boys of rock’n’roll, were credited by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright and activist and the first president of a Czechoslovakia free of an authoritarian Communist party and government, with providing the sound track for the “Velvet Revolution” which he led? To the Czechs’ delight, the Stones finally got to Prague on August 17, 1990, and, according to Eduard Preisler who was there and wrote an op ed about the event in the August 17, 2010, New York Times, their presence signaled that freedom had actually come to his country. The Stones kicked things off with Mick Jagger singing “Start Me Up” (1981):
More recently, on December 6 and 7, Bono and U2 returned to Paris and gave the concerts they had been obliged to cancel after the November 13 terrorist attacks when 130 Parisians were killed and 238 wounded. HBO televised the December 7 show, U2’s last stop on their world-wide “INNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE” tour, and my wife and I, who watched it together, found a welcome counterpoint to what we had witnessed little more than 3 weeks before on CNN. By all appearances, so, too, did the 15,000 or so Parisians in attendance at Accorhotels Arena, some of whom jumped up on stage, at Bono’s invitation, to dance alongside him. The concert itself was organized in a very compelling manner, with its first half comprised of U2 songs rooted in band members’ own personal experiences with the death and destruction inflicted by terrorists upon family members and friends and people they had gotten to know in their travels around the world.
Midway through the concert, its emotional highpoint, the band played the song that perfectly embodies what I’ve been writing here and which I hereby recommend as the first anthem of the social movement for change that will one day emerge — “Invisible” (2014).
The audience, again at Bono’s invitation, sang the choruses —
” I’m more than you know …
A body in a soul
You don’t see me but you will
I am not invisible
I am here ..
There is no them …
There’s only us …
There is no them
There’s only you
The post Fear & Hate: Seeds of Violence & Mass Murder was originally posted in its entirety OpEdNews and was written by Doctor Jack Carney.
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