This and that

Hmmm. Is your singing dreadful? The reason I ask is I am pretty sure I am going to be having a garage band this year. I always wanted to be part of a garage band and at over forty, I seem to have lost all shame. Since you're under forty, I can tell you it's a great relief not to worry about what people might think. One of the benefits to being over forty.

My grandmother was a fiddle player as well as a guitar player and she and her five sisters had quite a singing group. My great-grandfather was a shocking man because he was a fiddle player who welcomed all to his home where he fiddled away as his five beautiful daughters danced the night away with the young men who came a courting.

Anyway, my parents played the guitar and the harmonica and my mother at least has lost all shame. Bob Dylan is her favorite singer. I have various brothers-in-law and nephews who are also into the guitar and I think my shamelessness has finally convinced them to lose theirs. So so far I have four guitarists, if I count myself, two trumpet players, alas no drummers, but the parents of one of my BILs play the clarinet. And one possible mandolin player. I have two seed-filled foreign things that someone can shake in time to the music. Surely something can come of that this summer. Doncha think?

I get to the the girl singer as well since no one else is volunteering at this point. I am calling this my second childhood and we are all practising that 80s shake of the head that everyone had to get the shaggy hair out of our face. I emailed everyone a bunch of songs to practise with and when the snow is gone and the dog poop raked up, hopefully once or twice a month, we will shake, rattle and roll.

Anyway, back to Obama or maybe Jeremiah Wright, the pastor. What was the horrible thing he said in your opinion?

First of all, I thought that the controversy which seems to be mainly among white Americans, not blacks, illustrates perfectly my opposition to religion in politics as practised in the US. However, that being said, I also thought it illustrated the differences between Christian blacks and whites in the sense that unlike many who have been adversely affected by missionary efforts that decimated entire cultures and left people without anything to lean on, black American slaves took heart from the stories of Moses leading the children of Israel out of bondage. They took the gospel of Christ, and the dignity that we are all children of God and there is in Christ, neither slave nor free, to heart and it is that sort of politicising that led to the eventual abolishment of slavery. Christ gives strength to the prisioners and gives them courage to fight (without weapons) for freedom.

I don't think that most white Americans get it really. In a very real sense slavery only ended with the Civil Rights movement in the 60s when school finally became integrated and people weren't sent to the back of the bus based on race. That is not a long time for anyone to get over it, although it is always easy for the person who wasn't wronged to believe that the wronged party should just get over it already.

Slavery, particularly as practised in the US destroyed families, destroyed human dignity and self-worth, something that blacks have yet to recover from. And it is debatable whether US foreign policy has done more good than harm, on the scale of things. One can make an argument for the US in terms of WW2 but US policy has destroyed and kept in poverty most of Latin America. Like the whole which came first, the chicken or the egg, it becomes a question of whether two wrongs make a right or whether two rights right a wrong. But there are plenty of people all over the world who have every reason to damn America.

It's strange to me how white Americans can applaud a politician speaking in a white church and saying "God bless America" and promoting the idea that the US is somehow better morally than other nations and that is not seen as a bad thing, but when a member of a race that is still oppressed says the opposite, that suddenly is a bad thing.

That's my beef with religion and politics and why I just don't vote any more. Everything seems to be a choice between the least of evils and nothing is actually a choice for the good.

Although, and I don't know if you heard it at all, but the speech that Obama gave after all the controversy and reruns of J. Wright's sermons, was brilliant. I don't believe that Obama will ever be president but that speech will take its place in the history books along with Martin Luther's "I Have a Dream" and Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you."

It was a grownup speech. He didn't throw anyone to the wolves just because it was politically expedient to do so. He very neatly and clearly expressed the racial divisions as they are, not how people like to pretend they are, right down to his white grandmother expressing her fear of black men on the street to her dearly loved black grandson without ever seeing the irony in that.

My utter distaste for politics and religion aside, I stood up and cheered when I heard that. I have mixed-race nieces and nephews, and in him, I saw them, trying to walk the line between their two cultures.

Layla