Ani DiFranco - Grand Canyon: youtube.com/watch?v=P9SXvbKrvXw
I finished, this morning, reading Hitch 22 by Christopher Hitchens. It's not the most brilliant memoir but compelling and full of love of a secular, atheist sort. Full of love. Part of that love as born in some great frustration at watching us, as a people, destroy all our potential with tyranny, blind prejudice, hatred and killing, following any dark figure who promises eternal joy and delivers death. It's a love of humanity and out infinite potential.
I remember listening to Ani DiFranco's album Educated Guess for the first time as I drove through Fredericton in my brothers car, wanting to throw it out the window because it was so full of beauty I couldn't face it. And still, when I hear this particular song, it makes me come near to weeping.
I'm not a political body, neither am I patriotic. I'm fortunate to live in Canada and be part of it's history, I know, and know we still are full of problem and are not truly free but I move as best I can in my independence, free to think and act though my thoughts and acts will likely keep me in a certain sort of poverty through my life. And I respect deeply those who stand against the political system, the societal system, and fight to make things right, better, for everyone who requires that certain form of right for I rarely have the fire in me to do such a thing though I know it must be done. Simply put: I'm quite naive. I love and respect men and women of any form who wake and move among us and expect that the rest feel that same reverence.
But we all don't. It's upsetting, walking home from work between 3-5 in the morning and hearing the occasional drunk talk about some "bitch who wouldn't fuck" him. Or stopping quickly at the only 24 hour restaurant in the neighborhood, a Chinese food restaurant, and hearing them mock the accents of those that work there. Or on the streetcar where they yell at the homeless, the schizophrenics and the sex workers. And I only use those drunk assholes as an example of everything bad around me because they are the most obvious. Again, I'm quite naive and have trouble, often, to tell when things are wrong around me, in my community, among my people, and why.
But this song makes some sense to me. The sense it makes changes as I get older, but it makes some sort.
I am thankful I don't live in Baghdad, Israel or Darfur. Though, perhaps strangely, I do see some form of revolution among the people of Iran and wish to be among it.
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