Dissenting voices are off the air--Palast plays to few audiences--dissenting voices are off the air (most recently, thank God, they won't be ignored, though they're doing their best to sweep us away, Bloombroom)--while Diane Sawyer holds center stage with her blond hair and all the privilege that entails. Step on your rosy-rims, my Wellesley sister, and listen hard beyond those prison bars of the dollar sign. Rich men are making the rules, sings Shar, "cheering every bomb dropped from the sky." What a beautiful line. Joan, what have they done with the rain?
"Who Killed Joey"? asks Shar next. ALL OF US. We can't rest until he's resurrected and Wood Guthrie can rest in peace.
"He was only a kid." Think about it. No clichà ©. These are babies fighting for all of us. Babies still hold ideals. Old age loses those brain cells we all need to hang onto--these kids who are so much smarter even when exploited. If war must pollute the planet, perhaps they'd prefer to die. We should give them a better raison d'etre than that. Shar invokes he image of every Cindy Sheehan, the mother standing on the grave of her murdered son, standing for peace.
In temporary desperation, Shar turns to nature for solace with "Wild Geese," surrendering to the cycle of seasons, a peaceful process--"Oh what a sound!" Shar, I hope I have this right. Seasons, in turn, surrender to the light, a benevolent leader we all love.
"The Way" reinvokes the mother victimized by human hatred and its blind and violent offspring, war. Dying for a lie, mothers' children board the bus of death in fatigues, what an apt term for the clothing of war. Joan is weary, as are all of us, but Shar dances on, empowered by the dream of nurturing our young, swelling mothers' hearts with the promise that life will go on after war is defeated.
Our messianic place, Jerusalem, next takes the stage and Shar's dreamy tones hope that Abraham's children will lay down their swords--we must farm the blood-soaked earth and keep hope alive, so that out of that carnage a new world may emerge.
Between her words are so many dreams, the nonverbal that her lovely tones sing out in sweet harmony with her words. Shar must be listened to--there are so few sixties-style dreamers taunting the deserters whose children now return to them from college asking why.
"New World" offers hope to them and to all of us. How? We shall encircle the guns, all of us, the 99 percent. The dark morning of winter will yield now to a spring in which we will have the time to "breathe, think, walk, talk, sing, and dream." What a dream. We ignore it to our peril.
Without Shar's songs we are doomed. Like Joan, with her rare gift to reach us with beauty, which no one in their right mind can resist, we must never stop protesting until the New World, beyond the present Armageddon, rises like her songs.
Listen and never forget. We all have a dream.
For more on the indefatigable Shar, see my review of April 5, 2011, "Back to the Future?" click here. Visit her website, http://www.sharleensongs.net/listen.cfm, to hear some of her beautiful music and then, inevitably, click on the tab "Buy CDs." "Rumors of Peace" and her other albums are on sale for a song.
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