Sipping from the Fire Hose #CWA2015
Apr 10th
When South Boulder Creek jumped its banks last year there were just too many acre feet of rain to stay put. That’s how my brain feels after the deluge of:
The Globalization of Terror
In a Single Garment of Destiny
Gays Saved Marriage
Song making
Kick Ass Career Advice
Science Ethics: Means & Ends
Tuesday’s Jazz Concert
Negotiating Nukes with Iran
Lessons Not Learned in School
Performance: Art & Social Change
Wrangling with essential, complex questions, feelings, and conflicts about U.S. & international political issues, I am deeply grateful to end each conference day with the solace of cultivated beauty shared. Thank you, panelists, ALL, for your courage and willingness to come, to speak, to listen, to dare to live and give in ways that are uniquely yours. We need all the voices, all the knowledge and all the distilled wisdom. May we have the courage to sip and hydrate from the fire hose, not very comfortable….
Thoughts on the CWA by Leanne Soucek
Apr 7th
I’m on the elliptical at the gym, pondering the heart-nourishing, mind-sharpening experience of the first day of CWA 2015. After the emotional gravitas of hearing The Globalization of Terror and A Single Garment of Destiny, wondering anew what I can do personally, how I can help my students use their hearts, minds, skills to build inter-cultural bridges of understanding, respect and trust, I had the additional privilege to end my day with the experience of the having slogan sported for years on my car’s rear bumper: “Peace Through Music.”
Moderated by Boulder’s beloved Rebecca Folsom, the songwriters’ panel in UMC 235 wasn’t so much a “panel,” as it was a jazz quartet, with melody, solos, improvisation, interpretations and queries on heart-themes…simply beautiful. The tenderness of the communication between David Wilcox, Lillian Boutte, Tanya Ellsworth Boutte, Rebecca Folsom, a young rapper and the audience served as a model to me: this is what I, we, can do…the illustrious panel welcomed a one-minute open to healing performed acapella by the brave audience member. I left feeling strengthened, nourished, hopeful, ready to try again to love…
Quoting Leonard Bernstein after the shocking news of JFK’s assassination: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
by: Leanne Soucek and Students at the #CWA2015
Leonard Pitts talk
Apr 6th
Americans think “problem solved” because we are ruled by a black president named Obama and a black queen named Oprah.
He opened with a joke about one white street group with a bat and one black street group with a bat: Which is the baseball team and which is the street gang?
Whoopi claims New York, not African-American.
JFK was Irish, formerly not considered white…
Race isn’t fixed and immutable… Blonde-hair & blue eyes no not = “white,” necessarily. Walter White, head of NAACP, blonde-blue-eyed, was not “white.”
Race & new ethnicity are stupid ideas…meaningless, but seething with meaning:health, income, employment, history, making us who we are…race is our invention, only a few hundred years old…
Define race??? What does black mean?
What does white mean?
Europeans didn’t see themselves as white, but as members of their countries…
European Slavery began in North America with indentured servitude of fellow-Europeans
Later Songhai, Mandinkans, Tuaregs, became seen as black, as Negros because They were enslaved…
Not only blacks get victimized. White underclass “at least has their whiteness.”
Historically, white was something immigrants earned by abandoning cultural identifiers…languages…
Example given of a Jew who exhorted his cousin to let the got in teach him how to treat the Schwartzes…
Racial divisions between newest immigrant groups with older ones kept people from aligning. And if they stepped out if line, their jobs would be given to African Americans.
9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina — aid given and power restored only to “blood relatives.”
“Weapons of mass distraction… “Chuck D of Public Enemy… = boogeyman, threats, such as a 17 year old boy in a hoodie, or gay couple or Muslims or undocumented immigrants vs. predatory lending practices that cost people homes, schools that yield unprepared youth, an over-stressed military, or…
Black is still separate from American
It is past time that we are oblivious to being tied together in a single garment of destiny… In this interconnection. Are we destined to ONLY share the separation, the ways we are superficially different vs the bone deep, soul deep wYs we are all human…
(Power running out )
Leonard challenges us to seek common cause… Injustice anywhere = threat to everyone everywhere…we are tied together in a single garment of destiny…
We can avert our eyes from lessons if Trayvon and Eric Garner and Ferguson or we can give a damn…
I am looking at you…
You are looking at me… What do you see?
Leonard Pitts Isn’t concerned about ravening sheet-clad racists, but the majority of whites who let systemic racism go on without doing anything about it..,
Do You Think That fear of black men would go away if we socially took Responsibility for slavery?
Why haven’t we had an economic & social revolution?
