From The Half-Red House

Deborah, a new MySpace friend just wrote a worthy blog posting (http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=398252149&blogId=536613202) about a friend whose child has a severe form of muscular dystrophy (MD) called “Duchennes”, and about the attempt to address the disease using a FaceBook “Cause” application. The FaceBook friends she invited to join this cause, only a few did so. She concluded that much “love and “friendship” on the internet is so shallow as to be worthless in addressing the real human tragedies we face. She remarked that if she could trade her ability to play music and make art to somehow help this child be well and whole, she would gladly do so.

Being at best a reluctant participant in FaceBook, I confess that I would not have agonized over a decision to ignore the “Cause” invitation. We all have to make decisions and set priorities about involvement in who and what we support. Earlier in my life, when there were maybe four or five commitments that I might choose to make at a given time, I sometimes chose to make all of them, but now, when there are hundreds or thousands, I still have to limit myself to maybe four or five at a time that I judge to be most important. The internet has made me aware of hundreds of possibilities, but it has not expanded my ability to respond effectively to them, and it has not made ranking them easy either.

Because of the upcoming Fourth-of-July holiday, I was reminded of a young man I knew several years ago who was dying of mitochondrial disease, which, like DuChennes, is a genetically-transmitted disease. His mother suffered from guilt at having passed the fatal genes on to her son; she was alternately angry and depressed and no-one could comfort her properly. He was confined to bed and a wheel chair, intermittently in pain and always tired. A few years before, he had acted in a youth theater group that my daughter was involved in, and his acting had been sensitive and energetic. Now he could draw and write a little, but mainly spent his time sleeping. I had been hired at a low wage to take care of him for a certain number of hours per week and to see to it that he got out into the world and fulfilled some of his wishes before he became too weak to do so. One of his wishes was to go to the Fourth-of-July fireworks, and I was the one who drove him to the high school where the display took place. I had to haggle with the parking attendants to get a spot near the front. Once parked, he told me he was too weak to get out of the car into the wheelchair, so we watched the fireworks from the car. I know how important each such interaction can be, but which such situation comes into each of our individual lives and awarenesses is dependent on factors outside our conscious control.

When someone I know or have known well has a serious accident or illness but is not physically nearby, in the old days, I might not even hear about it for months. Now, the internet brings all such pieces of news to me instantly. Denise and I have relatively little money, so that the few dollars we could scrape up to help a hurting friend are rarely meaningful. We can pray, we can sign petitions and so on. If the friend is someone who lives nearby, we can and usually do do more.

I don’t think the “Internet Family” is meant to be an effective solution to all the ills that beset us, and I’m uncomfortable with most of Facebook’s conventions that are supposed to show support. I can’t avoid FaceBook entirely, but I  rarely go there with joy in my heart. I feel that the social internet is best at inspiring us to be hopeful and creative, and that LiveJournal and MySpace are better for that purpose.

There is no tradeoff between creative activity and compassion for suffering. They are both there and need to be addressed by us as they enter compellingly into our lives.

How did we get to Midsummer? It’s already the longest day and halfway to next winter’s bleakness.

A few miles away this morning, the morris dancers greeted the dawn on the summit of Pack Monadnock, but I was still in bed.

I found out that the exact time of solstice was 7:28 am our time, and made a point to be outside at that time. I played a little improvisation on my horn… no great inspiration, but at least there was the wonderful feeling of breathing in and out being linked with music. The birds joined in. One bird leapt off a branch and soared upward into a brightly-lit gap in the trees, and I was reminded of Dar Williams’s song “I Saw a Bird Fly Away”. Denise and I sang a few lines of the song together, then chanted as the magic moment came and went, hoping that the positive vibrations emanating from us and from the birds’ tiny syrinxes would somehow make the coming six months peaceful and fruitful.

On Saturday, I scrambled into my car after the Peterborough peace vigil to try and make it to the tail-end of the New Hampshire Peace Action annual meeting, where I knew David Rovics would be singing at 2:00 pm. It was (so I had been led to believe) at the Daniel Webster Birthplace in Franklin. I got to the Franklin town line at almost 2:00 and, after a few turns and returns, found the rural cabin where the great orator, defeater of the Devil, had been born.  It was deserted… worse than deserted.. the farmhouse next door that had served as a museum and ranger station the last time I was there, was all worn and smashed, and an apologetic sign said something about a private group trying to raise funds for restoration. This is New Hampshire, where even state historical treasures are left to decay in the tender mercies of private-sector charity.

I turned around and headed back into Franklin, assuming I’d missed the event completely, but on the way, I saw a sign for “Iraq Veterans Against the War” posted in front of something called “Webster Place”. Turning into the driveway, I saw cars parked in front of a brick building, but nothing obvious going on. Then I saw a sign with an arrow pointing down a dusty red-dirt road between cornfields, “NHPA this way”. I cautiously drove down the road following a white van, going slowly to avoid rocks and keep the dust clouds at a manageable level. After about a mile on, I came to a graveyard and a fork in the road, I took the fork that the van had taken, which dived out of the sunshine into the woods and eventually came to the banks of a river that was probably the Merrimack. There was a group of people swimming, and I asked the young woman who had been driving the van if this was where the Peace Action group was. She asked “Where have you come from?” with a fearful note in her voice that seemed to imply that nobody would just happen on this swimming hole and I must have stepped in to this reality from another dimension or something. My car was parked around the bend, and I guessed she hadn’t noticed me before. Then she calmed down and said, “Oh that must be at Webster Place”. “Is that the brick building I passed?” “Yes. ”

So, after pausing to take in the dappled sunlight on the river and the shapes of the huge oaks,  I turned the car around and drove back across the Kansas-like landscape to the brick building where Dave Rovics was finishing up his set inside a kind of chapel. He was explaining to the audience, mostly men and women my age or older, that it was perfectly safe to go to the big upcoming demonstration in Toronto, even though the police were expected to behave badly and make lots of mass arrests with tear gas and all. All we had to do was pay attention to the signs that the police were forming a box and stay out of the way. Then he sang “They’re Building a Wall” and did an encore. I got to talk with him a little afterward. He talked about how he had found that giving away his songs on the internet was tactically good for him and probably for most other indie musicians, though it was not based on any philosophical idea… it just worked to get loyal fans who then attended concerts and bought merchandise. He said very few musicians were getting signed with labels, and that for most of them, the label was more of a detriment than a benefit. He had recently toured Britain and Europe and had played with two of my favorite musicians, Leon Rosselson and Tracey Curtis, as well as with Attila the Stockbroker.

On the way back home, I stopped in Concord, where there was an ethnic festival going on at the State House. The variety of skin-tones and languages was astounding for a state that thirty years ago was almost all white. There was good drumming and dancing and food, and I wished I could stay longer. Summer is so short, and now that it’s begun, it feels like it’s almost over. I’ll try to get some pictures to put up shortly.