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Sweet Athens, Georgia
“Sing it out, y’all!”
Something happened in Athens, Ga., this past weekend. I can’t say exactly what, but I was there, I heard it, I felt it. At one point, I swear, the ’60s erupted out of the sweltering night, full blown, as a band called Abbey Road lit up College Avenue. What was happening was the town’s 32nd annual Human Rights Festival — its 32nd annual fusion of politics, music and spirit. “Stop All Wars!” proclaimed the banner on the stage. This was about the creation of peace, profound and joyous, you heard me, smack dab in the middle of Georgia.
It was a festival of rock and roll and blues and bluegrass, of folk music, hip-hop, jazz and dance; it was also a festival of immigrants’ rights, animal rights, gay rights, universal health care, environmental sustainability and, of course, justice for all, peace on Earth, and activism, activism, activism. And each cause, separate and distinct, glowed as part of a larger whole.
“Put your feet in the street!” long-time radical lawyer Millard Farmer cried from the stage, as he has done at the festival for years. This was what I felt come alive during the festival: a fearless and joyous, born-again, unapologetic, naïve belief (and I mean “naïve” in a good way, unbroken by the hard lessons of politics and life) that citizenship equals participation; that the world belongs to us, not to the high financial rollers and corporate elite; and that the time to take a stand is now.
I asked Ed Tant, one of the festival’s organizers and a long-time columnist for the Athens Banner-Herald, if the space-time continuum had been altered to allow the ’60s to show up suddenly in all its youthful enthusiasm (after all, one of the bluegrass bands that played, led by Tommy Jordan, was called String Theory). Ed’s response: “Here in Georgia, the only ’60s that usually erupt are the 1860s, so events like the Human Rights Festival are important anywhere, but especially here in the South.”
I was down there because I’d been invited to speak from the venerable old wooden stage that’s been reassembled every year for a generation, for most of the duration of the festival: the same stage graced by Dave Dellinger and Bill Ayers and Jesse Jackson and many other uncompromised, defiantly controversial activists and pacifists over the years, who have kept alive a belief in the world that is to come, that must come, if the human race is going to survive and grow up.
“Sing it out, y’all!”
This is what one of the members of Caroline Aiken’s band shouted out to the audience at one point, and the words were so clear, so right, so Georgia, I still feel them calling to me. Maybe peace has to be set to music — made to vibrate — before it can come into being.
I don’t say this simply. The festival contained plenty of hard-edged commentary, plenty of outrage and analysis, and if you were only casually present at it you might not have felt or cared about the connection between the words and the music, or you might have distinguished in some automatic way between performance and lecture, heart and head. But I began to feel a continual hum at the festival, magnifying and unifying everything that was going on — and the hum wasn’t emanating from the sound equipment.
The hum was the passion we ourselves brought with us to the festival. The hum was human rights, a fair world, a just world, a world without war. And it was more than that as well. It was more than idealism: a mocked, damaged word, no longer fit to describe the heart’s biggest yearnings. The hum was love.
“According to Plato,” writes Diarmuid O’Murchu in Quantum Theology, “love is the pursuit of the whole. Our broken, fragmented world yearns to be whole again.”
So this brings me back to Abbey Road, a band that — how can I put this? — doesn’t merely play Beatles music but seems to channel the Beatles themselves, with a driving energy that evokes the original music in all its complexity. They were the final act on Sunday night, and the last song they played (before their extended, non-Beatles encore) was the one that ruptured the space-time continuum.
“All you need is love, all you need is love,
“All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
“All you need is love (all together now)
“All you need is love (everybody)
“All you need is love, love, love is all you need.”
And that’s my last memory of Athens, with people of all ages dancing and swaying in the street in front of the stage on a perfect night, arms interlocked, singing out at the top of their voices. The whole weekend was fused into that word, “love,” and it was all we needed.
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19 Comments so far
Show AllCicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Too little, too late, too framed in the unsustainable Amurkan lifestyle context. Most of the people at that festival were probably not from Georgia but were performers and food concessions from across the region and plenty of students (especially the most activist ones) from other States. Georgia remains, outside the perimeter of Atlanta, a dumbed-down, backwards, right-wing bourgeois & plutocratic economic game preserve with consistently higher than average unemployment, the largest population of sex workers in the Southeast, the U.S. Army's gigantic base in Columbus, GA, and a governor who is one of the most pointless corporate hacks the State has had since the end of Reconstruction (and one of the most intimidating to the Atlanta McPress who never questions or criticizes him on his do-nothing Herbert Hooverism).
It's not enough to get together once in a blue moon and feel good. You've got to organize in a spirit of true cross-race, cross-income level, cross-educational level solidarity and actually formulate goals, an effective plan to achieve them and then work and push and push as long as it takes to get it done. The "Left" in America is riddled with too many low-level racist, income elitist, educationally elitist dilettanti whose enthusiasms for real world activism come and go like their tastes in restaurants and cars.
Sheesh!
Apparently you've never been to Athens nor any place like it.
Still, thanks for the totally uniformed and misdirected post. After years of reading CD, you've inspired me to make my first post.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Wrongo, whitehead, I lived in Athens, GA for three years and know all about how conservative that campus was and is. It was a bastion of college support for Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. The number of progressive activists as a percentage of the overall student population is so miniscule as to be negligible, and there has NEVER been one single solitary newsworthy item about effective progressive protest in Athens that made it even into Atlanta local news since the era of Charlene Hunter Gault in 1962. Even the school newspaper has been historically LAME and bourgeois. You will NEVER in your life see national news coverage of a protest event in Athens, GA on that campus. It's full of pasty-faced, Southern larval Republicans from the upper-middle-class and has one of the most stultifyingly conservative faculties in any State university in the U.S.
Fine then, I stand corrected.
Still, I disagree with your presumptions that 1) the progressiveness of a town should be judged in relation to the it's most regressive population and 2) that progressive = protest.
Are there lots of hyper-regressive transients and residents in Athens? Of course. It's home to a state university in Georgia. Was it a shock to my sensibilities to move to a place where they still had the stars and bars on the state flag? Of course. Is that all that's worth noting? Of course not.
I spent five years in Athens: five years surrounded by some of the most progressive people I've ever known. Sure, they occasionally took to the streets and were ignored by any and all media except for the Flagpole (one of the best local rags I've ever read). More importantly though, imo, they tended to live simply and they tended to be aware of and involved in the politics of their community. Nowhere else have I found such a large portion of the population intimately familiar with and involved in one of the most mundane (and most important) aspects of local govt: zoning laws. Could I go on? Yes. Would I move back? Yes.
In reference to my new moniker, you build your world out of your personal perspective, out of the choices you make, and out of the baggage you carry around. If your view of Athens is overwhelmed by college republicans, frathouse parties, and suburban Atlanta, then that's probably as much a comment about you as it is Athens.
BTW, if the progressive population in Athens is so small and the republicans rule the campus, please explain how, back in 2000, Nader beat Bush in the student ghetto as a write-in candidate.
Metal, I've lived in Atlanta since '77 and I concur with your assessment. Did not know about the sex worker thing, though. But now that I think of it, there are alot of "titty bars" here. Sorry, Ladies, that's what they call 'em here in Jojah.
You didn't mention this explicitly, so I will: Jojah's a "Right to work state." Translation: NO UNIONS.
Peace,
Jack Chase
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
The titty bars are nothing compared to the sheer number of "massage parlors" and low, medium and high-end call girls and boys. Atlanta has one of the largest populations of gay sex workers in the nation and the highest level of child prostitution.
Metal, I did not know this. But as one who has been involuntarily celibate for a decade and a half, I wouldn't. I like my sex with Love. I like your posts and I don't doubt you. What are your sources for this info so I can read more about this? Are the Wayne Williams child murders from the early '80's part of this story, here in bible-lovin' Jojah?
Peace,
Jack Chase
“Sing it out, y’all!”
Some of us join you in dancing along with this drummer. The beat is uplifting & joyous, rather than the all to familiar dirge that has become the cadence of the life for so many. Some folks could benefit from finding a new drummer.
Thank you Mr. Koehler.
Sioux Rose
Athens, Georgia is a COOL place. I used to sublet a professor's home there every summer and enter into a literary cocoon to produce a lot of work in the span of 2 month's time.
My professor friend and I took part in an anti-war peace march there just before Bush began his "campaign" against Iraq.
The town is eclectic and far more open-minded than most of Georgia. My professor friend took me to see a big tree in the middle of town. When the tree was first planted, the property owners wrote something into their will that involved the preservation of this great green being. And the town upheld it! So one can see this marvelous tree if they know where to drive just off the main drag to observe it.
In 2006 when I made my summer pilgrimage, a very hot drive up I-75 and then weaving through country roads for about 80 minutes passing the antebellum mansions in Madison, I arrived exhausted in Athens. However, my professor friend insisted that we go downtown to the little Athens theater as who was playing but 60's luminary, Ritchie Havens. My intended project that summer was a children's allegory of the 12 cosmic tribes, and as an "omen of agreement" Ritchie Havens sang a song, "That there are only 12 of us." And he began to sing the qualities of the Zodiac signs.
Magic happens in Athens. Its little downtown must have 6 delightful coffee houses, and each apparently draws its own type of clientele. A number of important musical groups got their start there, too.
So METAL, while you make important points about the Left, it sometimes only takes a spark to light a bonfire. And there are so many people that recognize the failed direction of our ship of state. Too many are having their views processed by the angry delusion masters at Fox or Hate Radio. So we should rejoice when the higher truths, which come down to love and oneness, DO get out there and move hearts and minds.
A friend of mine once said that love often happens between the unlikely (parties); and I think we can extend that to include the idea that political engagement, the greater love of humanity, can happen in unexpected places, too.
I wish I had been there! Athens is a great place! May the fire of political conviction founded upon genuine justice light many hearts!
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
Look, I'm glad Woodstock happened, too, but all getting together and wishing the rain will stop falling did not and does not work. Shit and wishes, which piles up quicker? For the Boomers at Woodstock I'd say the shit piled up on that generation far more quickly and by several orders of magnitude than they could've ever imagined in the late '60s. Yes, while Athens had in the 1980s and still has several cool & trendy places for the middle-class white kids to hang out in, what matters is the history of progressive organization and how effective their efforts were on and off campus there and there basically IS NONE. Not since the era of Charlene Hunter Gault and even that was only a brief historical blip in the long solidly white, racist Dixiecrat and Republican history of the place where even into the 1990s some of the overwhelmingly white male frat boys used to keep statues of little black jockeys on their front lawn and throw Confederate dress balls. I know. I lived there for 3 years. We used to filch kegs from those bigots' keg parties and re-sell them to a liquor store outside of town.
Sioux Rose
METAL: There are some on CD who blame the left for everything, and they never bother to put the pieces together, pieces like:
1. The right gaining control of mass media, especially through the deregulation that came on Clinton's watch in l996. Therefore much public opinion has been shaped around lies and deceits.
2. The insidious power of a shadow government entity as warned about by Eisenhower (MIC), with economic tentacles now planted in just about every state, acting as the excuse to continue funding war.
3. A certain percentage of citizens who gravitate towards authoritarian religious and moral belief systems making them easy fodder for "the control group" and its agenda. (The influence of the Christian right and its TV, radio & publishing channels impacting a purported 45-50 million citizens.)
4. The trend of government deregulation championed under Reagan but also greased by Clinton that allowed so much $ to amass in so few hands, thus making it easy to:
5. Buy politicians (the most expedient way to bend law to suit the bidding of big business)
6. Deregulate the stock market causing yet more money to bleed out of the lower fiscal strata and into the pockets of the Wall st. hustlers and their banker Siamese twins.
So I view these trends which are insidious (and I may have left out a few), while also looking at the BIG picture, which is to say the "As above, so below" equation. Every one of the outer planets has in the past 30 years crossed Capricorn, the Richard Nixon sign of authoritarian control(s). With Pluto there now, the global trend that's based on trafficking in fear, weapons, and surveillance cannot BE stopped. It is like an oceanic current, a momentum that WILL die of its own inverted power.
In other words, while the l960's and l970's saw a preponderance of planets crossing the spiritual, intellectual sign of Sagittarius, thus facilitating a climate that encouraged experimentation, generosity and what I term a "cross pollination" of cultural orientations, the Capricorn ethos is all about rules, discipline, and social (as well as political & economic) hierarchies.
We can mass together, write emails, letters, try to avoid being taser'd or placed in a pen in some protest, but we cannot alter the larger momentum. This is why I believe that the struggle to reclaim now lost liberties will go on until 2020 (or perhaps even 2025), while I also reference the way WAVE motion operates... that it's cyclic, that the force must roll under itself, going backwards in order to pick up forward momentum. This type of movement is why we see so many things moving backwards. We are yet to see the forward momentum that WILL emerge, and give birth to a different society, one likely to emerge by 2020. I think there will be global constitutions that attest to human rights, the rights of ecosystems, the ideals that progressives cherish... getting there will be the great and grave difficulty. Some of us may not see the promised land, like Dr. King. We will be more like the ants whose bodies become the bridge the next wave must pass over to get there. That is no excuse or disincentive to not do what each of us feels inwardly compelled to do. Our bodies carry a built-in expiration date, but the essence of the soul does not. We are part of all that is, and on levels the ego cannot grasp, we will be part of what is to come, as well as part of the struggle to obtain it.
I am not going to endorse any "beat up on ourselves" bull shit when the higher plan makes very clear why it is that the dark side, which is to say those married to greed regardless of the price extracted of others and/or ecosystems, seems to own prominence at this time. I believe this is the last dance with the menace of true totalitarian control (whether we call it: dictator, czar, king, tyrant, unitary executive, pharoah, fuhrer) that humanity as a whole will have to wrestle with.
Another phase is being born out of the dark ashes of this one. True, our numbers (as humans) will be vastly reduced... the wave is rolling under and in the process of bringing forth what is NEXT.
PEACE.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
You've read enough of my posts by now to know most of your post here is preaching to the choir, but we had better "alter the momentum" or better than 90% of the human species is doomed and is dooming hundreds of thousands if not millions of other animal and plant species--including critical species upon which homo sapiens is dependent.
"I am not going to endorse any "beat up on ourselves" bull shit..."
It is precisely that inability of the American Left for 40 years to reflect upon both its successes and failures since the '60s on any local, regional, national and international level; that failure to get back to basics, remember SOLIDARITY across race, education and income levels to ENABLE the kind of broad and deep organization this country and this world urgently needs that has kept the American Left in STASIS since the anti-war movement blew itself out in the early '70s.
The failure of the Left to address the creeping consolidation of mass media began in the 1980s with Rush Limbaugh and the buyout of the old TV networks and major news magazines by gigantic right-wing parent corporations. Just like the Democratic Party has had three decades to try to reform campaign financing so they could actually represent working-class people, the Left as a whole has had three decades to come up with SOME kind of even half-assed (let alone effective) media strategy. It has failed miserably--even as it failed to organize against the obvious threats posed by Bush & Cheney and now Obama.
Sioux Rose
METAL: I think we both feel the outrage and know something should be done. The difference is that you seem to blame the left for the attacks made upon it. Even the election of Obama took the wind out of the would-be-left sails because so many presumed he would begin to steer the ship of state away from the rocks. In my post above I left out the decimation of unions as another fact that sucker-punched the left. Still, while any activism may prove useful, I see the left in the position of surfers waiting to catch the wave. We've been dealing with a slack tide equivalent for a long time. Yet there is a massive power to the larger cycles of time, and as I related at length in my post, the themes purposely embedded into cosmic clockworks have of late favored the value systems espoused by conservatives. They are now in their hour of power, and as EZEFLYER often relates, things go VERY badly under conservatives. Their stealth campaign in media is expert at deflecting accountability to the "usual suspects" and easy targets like "illegal aliens," when in truth, conservatives have so emptied the pot ($) for their own diabolical (MIC, polluters) purposes that it is indeed more difficult to find funds for all that matters most, plus many have been fooled by their diversionary tactics.
Still, I believe this awful cycle, which is proving calamitous to human as well as animal/plant life, has its term. From my spiritual studies the purpose behind it is to at last awaken humanity to what its enslavement to false belief systems costs. The Aquarian Age champions sharing, progressive ideals, the idea that we are all connected. This ethos will be the dominant one for the next 2200 years... the labor pains to bring its essence into fruition is what we now experience.
I am pretty out of it when it comes to pop-culture, but even I knew that Athens, Ga. was the US base for 80's new-wave culture and alternative bands like the B 52's.
Well, maybe for this alone, Athens deserves a second look:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWEfmCvu8R8
I was a reluctant resident of Athens, Georgia, from 1986-1989 when my late husband was a doctoral student at UGA. We moved to Athens from the San Francisco Bay Area -- talk about culture shock!
My husband went to a conference and met the head of the brand-new Information Technology Dept. at the University; that's why we moved. But...he said to me, "We're moving to Athens for 2 1/2 years." I was thinking baklava and ouzo -- Athens, Greece -- not grits and Gatorade.
My career as a writer/editor went nowhere in Athens. The town was a disaster for me. Racial prejudice was about 1/16 of an inch below the surface. The Atlanta bookstore shelved Civil War books in a section called The War of Northern Aggression. Outside Athens were weird little towns like Dacula (Dracula without the "r"), where I once saw a huge farmer stirring a bubbling cauldron, a sign beside him proclaiming "Bald Peanuts" (I finally figured out he meant Boiled Peanuts).
Georgia's a whole other world. Athens thinks it's an educational oasis -- it's just a small town in the very backward state of Georgia. I'm so glad to be back in California!
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
FINALLY, someone who's actually been there, seen through the trendy nightlife facade and knows WTF she's talking about!
I love the south. It has natural wonders well worth seeing. The only problem I have with the south is southerners, really just white southerners. Everyone else was great.