I'll Keep Doing the Work You Were Doing as if I Were Two

Photo of Hadestown: Youth Edition
courtesy New Surry Theatre

This Sunday, I am struggling to live in my broken heart and not in my rage.

So having had the joy of seeing New Surry Theatre's awesome production of Hadestown: Teen Edition last night, I am reflecting on the power of live theater not only to entertain but to move us, to change hearts and minds. For the record, if you are in this area: do not miss this show! These teens are so excellent -- amazing choreography, great voices, stellar acting. Kudos to all who worked on it for a real community triumph, the type of theater we need more of in our communities, and especially to director Lori Sitzabee for bringing out the very best in her young cast.

This also causes me to reflect on why it is so important for children (and adults!) to learn to read fiction, and stories about those different from ourselves.

The arts at their best are not mere entertainment to be consumed.

Theater, literature, visual arts are the actions by which we build imagination, which is in turn needed to empathize with those not-us and then to have compassion and even to take action on behalf of others' suffering.

Imagine if instead of unrestrained male violence and a lust for power over others we fostered these things in raising our kids: imagination. Empathy. Compassion. Action. Art: the creation of beauty. Every day, a living process.

These are the human powers and skills that Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin and many other peacemakers called for and taught.

Too often, our specific culture, which continues to be dominated by white men, guns these teachers and models down.

Our power, and our trick to bringing a different future forward, is that for every individual gunned down 10 more of us step into their place.

"It could have been me, but instead it was you,
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two
I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through
But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom
If you can work for freedom I can too."

- singer songerwriter Holly Near, after Kent State, in 1970 and the 1973 torture and assassination of Chilean theater director and poet Victor Jara by the junta who overthrew, with U.S. support, the Allende democracy in Chile

We've been here before. We will be here again. Those of us who believe in peace can never let up.

And if history is going to repeat itself -- let's hope we see a repeat of Nixon's 1974 resignation.

As opposed to a repeat of 1985's Iran-Contra scandal in Nicaragua -- another attempt to overthrow a democratic effort in opposition to the U.S.'s colonialist interests.

Let justice prevail, with each of our active support.