HELIOLITH

My lately dizzyingly busy personal life (a new baby, the end of the school year) having held me back from writing as I would like, my vision of content is shifting slowly toward a more child-friendly message. An activist that I once worked with told a group of teachers as we were trying to infuse our curriculum with more anti-racist and social justice content: kids need to hear an overwhelming majority of good news.

I can’t remember the ratio he offered but it was something like 4 good bits of positive news for each bit of tragedy. That has really stuck with me. I don’t think it’s necessarily only true for kids, but adults arguably also have a good news to bad news ratio preference [”gbnrp”]. Even if my own gbnrp is around 80% goodness for a positive outlook on life, postive mental health, and general productivity, I inevitably find myself drawn to the most disturbing of stories; I don’t doubt others who write/blog find themselves in similar situations.

I was really struck by this BBC story today that said of the current live8 concerts that are taking place around the world, aimed at ending poverty, especially in Africa. “An estimated TV audience of up to five billion people is watching.” Five Billion! With a world population just above 6 billion, that’s an incredibly huge number of people. The live8 site puts that number at 2 billion, which is still huge, although much different. Either way, it’s likely to have an effect on global perspectives. Hopefully enough to see through token pledges like that Bush would have us believe is progressive.

The power of music, I have no doubt, could catalyze global change on a massive scale. More events like LIVE8 may well help us toward that end. I’ve been playing around with my guitar more lately, and my favorite folk song anthology, Rise Up Singing and am rediscovering how much song is an antedote for the blues. There’s this quote I often think of by a man named Neem Karoli Baba via Miracle of Love– he said, “Food is the greatest intoxicant, love is the best medicine.” I’m pretty sure he would have included much of music under the umbrella of love.