Veg Among the Heathens: August 2018

I wrote a new song about the issues that are weighing on me, closest to my heart in these dark times: human rights and the environment. It is a song for the midterm elections in November, about voting. Enclosed at the end of this post are two versions, one with just the lyrics on one page, and one with chords over a few pages. It is easy to play on a guitar, please feel free to sing it if you like it when you hear the song. This song is dedicated to a man that I do not know. His name is Cody Hall, and he spoke in a moving youtube video, "Mni Wiconi: The Stand at Standing Rock". He made an eloquent call to action. This song is my answer to his call -- Mr. Hall, thank you, I listened to my heart.

Cody Hall is a warrior and a leader, and he comes from a lineage of great leaders: Chief Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse. He leads by word and the example of his courage. I am a nerd who loves music, who, since Nov. 2016, cries a lot. I am from a lineage of good farmers. My name, Korber, means "weaver", a family name that links me to some long forgotten ancestor who did something useful for work, and I like to imagine, maybe even something beautiful. We sang a lot in my house when I was growing up. Protest songs: Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. We always cared about justice, both for people and for the Earth. My sister and I were taught to respect people like Cody Hall, people willing to sacrifice so much to try to make our country, our collective home, better and stronger. I personally care a lot about science, and like most scientists in our times, I express myself through slide shows. So I did what I could do, made a song, and a slide show video. Here's to Charts, Graphs, and Rock 'n' Roll. Here's to the brave Cody Hall.

Thanks to the wonderful musicians, friends old and new, who gave life to my tune. I will be posting a recording and a YouTube video to go with it, sung by my amazing friend and musical mentor, Lisa Carman. I'm honored to have had the talented Jono Manson, Satish Pillai, Paul Pearcy, Justin Bransford, Adrienne Bellis, Janice Ritter, and Michael MacDonald in musical collaboration to record the song, as well as Peter Oviatt who brings All Hands On Deck with his banjo for the video credits. And thanks to the all the photographers whose work I weave; your art visually tells the stories of our times. Photo credits are at the end of the video.

Also, I want to explain my motivation for including of one of photos I have in the video. It is there for a complicated reason. It is of sweet little girl who looks so afraid, at the border crossing in Texas with her mother. It is picture by John Moore/Getty. Mr. Moore has shown us with an unflinching clarity the deep human suffering in our borderlands. His work as a photojournalist helped wake up our nation's compassion. His photo of this little girl went viral. Some sources who posted it were confused about her status, and thought she had been separated from her mom, so it was a big story when her father wrote in that she and her mom had not been separated. But because of this confusion, the far right shrilly screamed "FAKE NEWS"; I viewed this as a cynical attempt to drown out the real story, and distract our nation from our newly found resolve to treat asylum seekers better. And distracted we were. Over and over the press coverage was about the many people calling this picture fake, shifting our attention from the families. As a consequence, for precious days, the national debate on the issues was confounded.

Photo by John Moore/Getty; Asylum seekers, June 12, McAllen, Texas

She is in my video because her tears are their own truth. I'm weary of people simply bellowing "FAKE NEWS!", and the news coverage of The Bellow then drowning out the deeper truths we are forgetting as a nation how to recognize. This is just one example of this dangerous pattern. In this particular case, the deeper truth this picture reflects is that asylum seekers have often journeyed far through terrible conditions; many faced this journey because they were fleeing terrors we can only begin to imagine. Once they are at our border, but only at our border or in our lands, they have a right to ask for asylum and to have their case considered. This is under international law for refugees, human rights laws that America helped craft and has historically supported. This little one's face was a real refection of a real moment on her and her mom's journey to seek asylum. She was afraid. There is power and truth in this photo. As this photo came out, our government was beginning to report that many many other children, at just such a moment, were taken away from their parents and put into child detention centers, through the "Zero Tolerance Policy" imposed by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump administration policy. Alex Azar, secretary of Health and Human Services acknowledged 3,000 children had been taken by July 5th, 2018. The kids are so vulnerable, and so are their parents. What lifetime scars has Mr. Session's brutality left them with? These people deserve respect and consideration of their case. We should greet them with compassion, not fear. Could you have taken your child through such a journey, risking all to seek safety, and survived?

Fact checking and truth is important. Corrections when mistakes are made are valuable and good. When this picture was so much in the news, it was right for the press to be very clear that she and here mom were not separated. But what should our response be, as human beings, to learning our small friend was not taken from her mother? How about "Thank God, these two are together!" instead of "FAKE NEWS!".

Thanks to what remains of our Free Press, which is under constant attack from this administration, the American people saw the horror of family separation, even though our government for the most part closed these children's camps off from public view. And when we learned about it, our people demanded that it stop. Our country turned out to have limited tolerance for zero tolerance, once we understood the implications. Our courts also demanded that the separations stop, and that separated families be reunited, in response to the legal case for the families brought forward by the ACLU. But Jeff Session's nightmare policy had been so poorly implemented that for many of the children, they did not even keep record of who they were, who their parents were. Some babies were so little they could not yet even speak their own names -- so they even stole their names, when that and their family's love were all they had in the world. As a consequence, now that at least we are going in the right direction and making progress in righting this terrible wrong, the process of reuniting families has been muddled and is shamefully slow.

We need to treat people with dignity and compassion. We are Americans. We can do this.

Creative Commons License
CC Modification: It is OK to sing this song in any live performance, non-profit or for profit.