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- MAROON is
the jazz group I lead with Benny Lackner.
THIS PART OF MY SITE HAS MOVED
to the head
fulla brains.com site. Check out our latest album, Who
the Sky Betrays, featuring special guest Marc Ribot. Hear
it, buy it, enjoy it!
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Dear
family and friends,
This is a very sad and scary day [day after U.S. presidential election].
But there's lots of energy out there! We can't give up, we must fight
harder!
Change in the United States has rarely been initiated via the ballot
box. It has usually been the pressure on government through not only
information dissemination and preaching and legal battles, but through
principled social disruption, the civil disobedience of abolitionists,
suffragists, labor organizers, civil rights organizers, college students,
peace activists, feminists, queer rights activists, farm workers, environmentalists,
anti-police brutality community groups, and so many others who've taken
risks to fight for more freedom, equality, and justice, and for the
right to pursue happiness.
If we put all our hopes on elections, we will be lost. We can't allow
the frightened, narrow-minded other half of this country to take away
the many freedoms our forebears have won. We can't let our greedy, hateful,
selfish government continue to put everyone all around the world --
indeed the planet itself -- in such mortal danger. We have to do something
bigger, something more. We have to be willing to take risks and disrupt
the status quo.
Frederick
Douglass said, "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced,
where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that
society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them,
neither persons nor property will be safe." We must act up! It
is time to get angry, it is time to take the energy that this election
generated even further. We have to find new strategies of civil disobedience
and put aside our anxiety at being uppity and unpopular and put down
and arrested. As Douglass said, "Power concedes nothing without
a demand; it never has and it never will."
Others went to jail and to their graves so that most of us don't have
to work endlessly as slaves or as child factory workers or as mothers
of ten dying during the birth of the eleventh child. We can vote. We
can go to college. We can intermarry without being killed, and so on.
But there's so much more that hasn't been won, and if we're not vigilant,
we'll lose what we have: Bush is going to be filling the next Supreme
Court with Scalias and Thomases, and he and his cronies will continue
to loot the national treasury and murder in our name.
We all need to think carefully and creatively about what we're going
to do. History says it's our turn: the "Evil Empire" has a
mandate. Are we going to go along with the program just because stopping
it will be messy and challenging?
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation,
are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain
without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar
of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a
physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes
nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will."
Let's put our heads together. Let's not fall into despair and inaction.
We give up so easily sometimes, it's inexcusable. Look at the kids of
the early sixties Freedom Rides who volunteered to ride into the South
to do voter registration, and think about how they changed all our lives;
now think about how the Republicans are working to undo voting rights
today. Are we going to be the ones who gave it all away? NO! If we stand
together, we can do it -- millions of people voted against Bush, many
for the first time. OK, so it is depressing that we live under a constitution
that provides a winner-take-all system. But those red states aren't
as red as they are made to seem. All does not have to be lost.
Putting flowers in the gun barrels of tanks no longer seems quaint to
me. Let's get creative... and rebellious!
Love,
Hillary
My
friend Ken Ehrlich adds an important point:
I also think that along with continued and increased activism for progressive
causes, we MUST affirm and re-affirm over and over again the importance
of creative work. We have to remind people that dollars truly do not
equal happiness. How many people would choose, for example, to become
a millionaire only if they could never enjoy music again? That your
voice speaks to people in an emotional, raw way when you sing is something
intangible and that is something that I think most people value tremendously.
As we fight for justice and peace, we have to keep making difficult,
complex, and beautiful works of art that speak to and beyond the narrow
confines of this reactionary historical moment.
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