The Unifying Power of Music

One of the benefits of Sir Hook's Traveling Medicine Show is the ability to revel in live music, which sadly doesn't occur with great variety in my hometown.

And...the benefit of live music is the opportunity to realize the Unifying Power of Music. It's a language that knows no gender, race or age barrier to those who are open to its force.

Lady Allwinky joined the Traveling Medicine Show during my past two week trek across Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Illinois. One of the highlights of the trip occurred in a taxi cab in Orlando, Florida, on our way to Hard Rock Live at Universal Studios to take in The Decemberists, a band that we had to bypass at Lollapolozza in order to see Fleet Foxes play during the same time.

Our Cab driver's name was Lunes, a survivor of a Haitian raft trip to Florida, who is now an American citizen, father of three, and an old soul. When Lunes told us that he was from Haiti we shared our stories of Haiti with him.

Our parish church has a twinning program with a parish in Haiti, where we send supplies and support the community in various ways. We have been to Haiti once and we pay for the education of Eloise, a beautiful Haitian girl, who we have supported since she was 5 years old. She is now 16 and wants to be a doctor.

I showed Lunes a picture of me playing with a Haitian band on my iPhone and that's when the Unifying Power of Music kicked in.

Lunes played us a CD of the Haitian national music known as Kompa. Kompa is a blend of reggae, jazz and soca that is a natural body mover! He delighted in translating the French and Patois lyrics for us as we jammed our way down the interstate in the Harvest Moon night.

A few days later in Atlanta we took in the U2 360 tour at the Georgia Dome. This massive display was an awesome experience, as it brought together 70,000 individuals and moved us as one through the Unifying Power of Music.

Still, with all the technology, beauty and social conscious that makes up U2, there was something more special and sacred about that cab ride with Lunes in Florida. I felt that Kompa helped me to set my course again with the Compass of my soul.

Sir Hook Who Practices Unity Through Diversity Through the Unifying Power of Music of Warrick

This Post is dedicated to my Father, Kenneth Earl "Bud" Wells, who would be 83 today if still alive. Bud introduced me to my first live musical experience, the Country Western Music Shin Dig.

Divide-and-Conquer

Jim Carey in the Mask just repeated a classic military technique on the park bench to Cameron Diaz when he said, "Like Napoleon, I will divide and conquer!" Of course he was talking about a different kind of division.

Divide-and-Conquer is as old as time, and still we never seem to be able to realize when it is being used against us, or even some times, by us.

Another classic example is made very effectively in the cartoon above about our relationship with Iran.

Yes, Divide-and-Conquer are as old as time. So is the quest for Unity-through-Diversity, the sacred battle cry of the Knights of Moleskine Spirit and Ale.

To quote some famous examples:

1) "Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand." - Matthew 25:14

2) "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South." - Abraham Lincoln

3) "People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the older people and the kids?...It’s just not right. It’s not right. It’s not, it’s not going to change anything. Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to beat it. Let’s try to work it out" - Rodney King

The same tactic is being used in politics today in regards to the attempts to reform healthcare. An article by columnist Tom Ehrich, an Episcopal priest, in the Indianapolis Star really caught my attention. He compares the current divide-and-conquer tactics to the same tactics used during the Woodstock days.

TOM EHRICH

Woodstock was an example of classist divide-and-conquer

Posted: August 22, 2009

When the original Woodstock sprang up 40 years ago, my own off-the-wall adventure was taking place in Pittsburgh as I attempted to be a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. It was an uphill battle. I was a clueless young man taking a crash course in actual work.

I wasn't even aware that Woodstock was taking place in upstate New York. I was more concerned with Vietnam and being in the middle of a vast social upheaval that had little to do with a muddy field in Bethel, N.Y., and a lot to do with the exploding of cultural, economic and political land mines laid in the 1950s.

My Pittsburgh-centric window on that upheaval was watching steel barons preside over the self-destruction of the American steel industry because they were too smug to adopt new technology and to compete globally.

Social upheaval in the 1960s and '70s had nothing to do with bare-breasted stoners at a rock concert. That season of discontent was another eruption of America's ongoing class warfare, in which the wealthy relentlessly game the system, defeat opposing movements such as labor unions and civil rights, shower money on politicians, accumulate more assets than they need and guarantee that their cadre remains small and impregnable.

In this particular version of class warfare, the haves shine a spotlight of scorn on happenings like Woodstock, so that have-nots will resent their own children while haves make off with the loot. Blame discontent on rock music and wanton youth, they said, while the self-serving lay seeds for actual disparity and actual despair.

Let's get real here, shall we?

It wasn't Jimi Hendrix who mismanaged postwar industrial prosperity into rust. It wasn't Janis Joplin who created a financial industry that routinely causes recessions.

It wasn't public nudity that produced real estate bubbles and predatory lending. Nor was it dope that mired the seething majority in declining real income and took away the promise of steady employment.

It wasn't long hair that started mainline churches on a long slide into nonviability. It wasn't "flower power" that morphed America's finest colleges into a ticket to wealth, rather than an incubator for invention and wisdom.

Youths are always a convenient target. The real action takes place elsewhere: in political caucuses that divide up government largess and in executive suites where the normal risk-and-reward calculus gets untethered from accountability.

In this latest anger season in U.S. politics, cynical forces are again fanning fires of confusion and loss into wildfires of rage against the wrong targets. Such diversionary tactics trace to Reconstruction and the rise of the Klan, or xenophobic anti-immigration riots, or McCarthyism, or religious extremism.

Will we fall for it one more time? Or will we, this time, stop shouting, ignore those who are trying to make us angry, and look clear-eyed at broken systems that need our best efforts to get fixed?

Food for thought on this Saturday.

Sir Hook the Unifier of Warrick

Unity Through Diversity: A Lesson for the American People

We the People.....



That is how the Constitution of the United States begins. "Power to the People" is more than a catch phrase to the framers of the Constitution. Sadly, our current political climate has given rise to leaders who have forgotten that they are elected to serve the people and not themselves.

The United States of America began as a grand experiment in the the basic tenant of the Knights of Moleskine, Spirit and Ale..."Unity through Diversity". We could have very well taken on the name of the Unified States of America.



Now is not the time, nor should there ever be time allowed, for the politics of hatred. Rush Limbaugh, who I prefer to call Lush Limpballs, says he's an American. However, the self anointed leader of the "New Right Wing Republicans" has one HUGE problem with his rhetoric. He wants the American President, and thus, the American people to fail. This is the same results that Osama Bin Laden wants for the American people!

Wake up Rush! You're a terrorist and a traitor to the American people! You should have Bin Landen on your show so you can discuss how nice it will be to have a country full of people that finally believes as you do (whether they like it or not), instead of a country full of people who have the freedom to think for themselves!



Republican House Minority Leader, John Boehner, lead the boycott of Republican votes in the house for the current stimulus package proposed by President Obama. This is the same man who spear-headed Bush's bailout of Wall Street and the funding for Iraq's infrastructure, which resulted in us literally losing 12 billion dollars in bundled up cash there. His answer, "It's not that big of a price to pay for freedom." What?! Yet, somehow this is too big of a price to pay for the American people!

John Stewart on his Daily Show a few nights ago summed it up best..."We should declare the American people terrorists and then let the government invade us...that way we would get the money we need, the buildings repaired, the democracy restored and schools rebuilt." A sad, yet true irony.

It's time to put a stop to this finger pointing and political back stabbing at the expense of "We the People". How?



By realizing that the same flag that stands behind President Obama and Senator Boehner is the same flag that stands behind every American. The same flag that stood behind it's founders, our ancestors who sacrificed to keep the dream a reality and us who stand on the cliffs of despair today. It is a symbol of hope and of "Unity through Diversity" that has...and still can...make us a better and stronger people.

John McCain did have it right when he said, "Country first." We are all Americans first before we are a Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, etc. I invite the followers of Rush Limbaugh to come out of their terrorist caves and put "Country First" once again.




It is time to rise above what we were and to strive towards what we can become!

Sir Hook Who's a Real American of Warrick