DUKES FANS:
“HOPE is How One Perceives Everything”-
Susan Allenbacak
“Music is the healing force of the
universe” - Sun Ra
“Hope attracts chances.” —Toba Beta
“We must accept finite disappointment but
never lose infinite hope.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
Wednesday, July 13 my wife and I went to a concert at
World Café Live featuring Sharon Katz and the Peace Train. Katz is an amazing
guitarist, singer and organizer who is a white South African woman. In the
early 1990’s in apartheid South Africa she put together a 500 member
interracial and inter-cultural performance group and did performances of a show
called, “When Voices Meet.” She then became an ambassador for Nelson Mandela,
chartering a train and performing “When Voices Meet’ at dozens of places around
South Africa, risking jail and possibly death. It was a movement that tied in
with the anti-apartheid movement and played an active role in getting people to
vote, spread news about health and child welfare, and more. After Mandela’s
election Sharon became even more involved in what we would call humanitarian
and social justice work, starting music therapy groups, raising money for
children displaced by warfare, HIV/AIDS, and bringing stories and songs of
peoples’ struggles to places around the world. Over the years this work that
has taken her on tours to just about every continent. Her concert last
Wednesday featured Peace Train 2016-a multi-cultural group of children from
schools across the country singing and dancing to South African tunes and
Sharon’s own rhythm-heavy and inspirational compositions. The concert attracted
people of all ages, all nationalities and colors. It was a veritable United
Nations of joy, happiness, commitment and unity as Sharon and the kids moved
together, hand clapped, sang, shouted, and danced their commitment to a world
of inclusion and peace. It was also a moving reminder of the central and
powerful role music has played throughout history as a unifier and inspiration
in movements for social change. We stood, cheered, clapped, cried and left the
World Café with a heart full of energy, love, and most importantly, hope.
Friday July 15 saw us at one of our favorite spaces, The
American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, MD.. A museum dedicated to the work of
outside artists, this museum is one of the most joyous spaces web have ever
visited, filled with color, unique sculptures, vivid drawings and paintings,
and thought provoking exhibits organized around wide ranging themes. The
current major exhibition is ‘The Big HOPE Show,” a multi-media examination and
presentation of thoughts, experiences, and ideas about what hope is, does, can
be and enables us to do. From one man’s cartoons and colorful post card
illustrations of his years long medical issues and struggles to paintings and
drawings re-examining the myth of Pandora’s Box, the exhibit challenges and
involves one directly and calls for emotional responses. There is a video
speech by Kevin Briggs, a San Francisco Bay Bridge officer who has talked down
some 200 potential suicides from the bridge. He talks about how he tries to
listen to the people when he talks with the would be suicides, trying to find
places where some little bit of hope still lies within. He then tries to speak
to that bit of hope still in them. There is also a wonderful video examination
of Philadelphia artist Lily Yeh and the work she did in transforming a
neighborhood in North Philadelphia with her Village of Arts and Humanities, and
how she has since carried that work to places around the world. There is a
scrapbook table and exhibit that calls for us to look at our positive memories
as a scrapbook of a trip through our lives. And there are paintings that look
at the near universal human tendency to look at birds and butterflies as images
of hope and prayer. The exhibit was inspiring, and it also reminded me of who I
am and how much hope is a part of that.
As a child of the 1960’s, a son of African-American Southerners who came north and established a household in a Jim Crow world, and as a musician, teacher, and birdwatcher, I am constantly and deeply involved with hope. All of those activities point to a person who engages the world, believes in looking for the positive, imagines what can be, is working in some small way to make what can be possible, and who delights in being a human being in this world; the world that is here right now with all of its challenges. And over these past few weeks, I needed to be reminded once more that hope lives deeply within me and that it is one of the thing that motivates me; that it is an essential part of who and what I am. Last week the concert and the museum did that for me in real ways, and I am so grateful. While it may appear to be "hip" and "cool" to be cynical, hope is what provides the fuel for important change. Just look at the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and more. We live in a world where hope, joined with persistent and consistent action, has provided important change in the face of incredible odds. And we need to remember that.
As a child of the 1960’s, a son of African-American Southerners who came north and established a household in a Jim Crow world, and as a musician, teacher, and birdwatcher, I am constantly and deeply involved with hope. All of those activities point to a person who engages the world, believes in looking for the positive, imagines what can be, is working in some small way to make what can be possible, and who delights in being a human being in this world; the world that is here right now with all of its challenges. And over these past few weeks, I needed to be reminded once more that hope lives deeply within me and that it is one of the thing that motivates me; that it is an essential part of who and what I am. Last week the concert and the museum did that for me in real ways, and I am so grateful. While it may appear to be "hip" and "cool" to be cynical, hope is what provides the fuel for important change. Just look at the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights Movement, and more. We live in a world where hope, joined with persistent and consistent action, has provided important change in the face of incredible odds. And we need to remember that.
For many of us these past few weeks have been a
hard time. Our screens, TV’s, papers and more have been filled with images of
violence, fear, hatred, and anger. Our new technology brought us face to face
with some unpleasant things that have been a part of the United States for some
time but unseen by many of us, including the shootings of unarmed people by police and the hunting and killing of law enforcement personnel. I have talked to and heard many friends and
acquaintances mention how scared they are feeling and how unsure they are of
where we as a nation may be headed. For those of us who are committed to a
world of peace, tolerance and diversity, it may seem as if we are farther away
from that vision than ever before. Those powerful positive motivators, vision and hope,
may seem very, very distant. But experiences such as Sharon’s concert and the Visionary
Art Museum’s exhibit are strong reminders that there are plenty of reasons to
be positive and plenty of examples of the transformative and positive power of
hope being lived and demonstrated all around us. And as Lily Yeh’s life illustrates, there are many people,
groups and efforts in the world that are building on that hope and working to
bring aspects of it into existence. Fear, despair and conflict drive our media-it is
flashy, it delivers viewers for advertisers, and it can even ignite a political
movement or two. But it has never produced a way of life or a society that has
delivered peace, stability, beauty and tolerance. Never. We need to remember
that and to focus instead on hope and to find ways, even small ways, we can be
a part of building the world in which we say we want to live. Using that hope to
motivate us and then putting effort into manifesting it are the only things
that can defeat our fears and help us envision, engage with and build toward
the world we want. For I agree with the words of Holocaust survivor,
psychologist and philosopher Victor Frankl: “The last of human freedoms is to
choose one’s attitude.” I say look up, do not despair. Choose hope, and then
work in some small way to make what you are hoping for happen in our world. We must be the world we wish to see and to live in. It starts with us. I say, choose hope.
1) Here is a link to Sharon Katz’s music and work: http://sharonkatz.com/
2) Here is a link to the American Visionary Art Museum’s
exhibit, The Big Hope Show: http://www.avam.org/
3) If you are interested in getting a list of some
organizations that I support and think are doing some important positive work,
please write me.
