July 3rd
A sultry Sunday afternoon, and here I am at Starbucks, moving words on this screen, like pieces on a chessboard. Yesterday evening was spent at Henry Maier Festival Park, Milwaukee for Summerfest. Summerfest bills itself as the worlds largest music festival. As a marketing ploy, I suppose the outsized claim works. The site is a 75 acre lakefront venue with 7 permanent stages, the event spread over three consecutive weekends, 9 days of music.
In past years I have attended the festival to many times to count. Walking along the lakefront with the Milwaukee skyline in view, feeling the music envelop my body, others walking close nearby, how often I have thought, — this is paradise, an interlude of peace, love and understanding, a state of being that simply “is”, needing no argument of justification. There are no words to describe those moments of serendipity when rhythm, the rhyme, and the harmony is right.
Certainly this is not the push and pull of ordinary life, the friction of balancing the demands of a body/mind to available resources. Resources is the catch-all abstraction for food, clothing, shelter, and community. Some of us have more than we need of the material items, a bloat in fact, which makes the cultivation of community difficult. Others, a majority, scrape by on hourly jobs, underpaid and invisible to the endowed few. But I digress. It’s just that music has the power to reveal the common adaptability which all members of the homo sapiens tribe have to comity, mutual respect and sharing of aid. It is possible to glimpse what we could make of this life, all of us together, no one left out or consigned a subservient status.
We attended Summerfest specifically to take in a concert by the BoDeans. The BoDeans from Waukesha Wisconsin wrote and performed songs that shaped a generation in the 1980s and 90s here in the Midwest. Some 30 years or more later I was inspired to see and hear Kurt Neumann deliver lyrics that are if anything more relevant, more prescient to the challenge that is ours, at this late hour in our republic. If anything the assault upon equality under the law has intensified for all women. Members of the gay community continue to resist homophobic structures, to advance an alternative approach to living than that of so-called divinely sanctioned male-female family unit. The music of the BoDeans still proves to be a keen weapon subverting prejudices that we unintentionally learned, and a tool for building a new community, something apt for the 21st century.
The effort to be at Summerfest was worth it, even for this old guy. The experience transcends religion. To this secular minded guy, Henry Maier Festival Park is holy ground.
Here I am, with these thoughts. I am also wondering if I will find the right words to respond to an email from a friend. (The email was on my mind all the while I was in Milwaukee.) He asserted that a woman has the right to do as she wills concerning reproductive health, in his opinion. However he applauds the decision of the Supreme Court affirming the States Rights Doctrine, allowing the legislature of each state to grant or to deny this freedom to their female citizens. My mind reels at the disconnect. How to respond? Is reason called for? Is a full-out attack mode now what “realism” demands?
What tune will tie us together, aiding our focus on what remains to be accomplished? This one of course: Closer To Free by The BoDeans.
Closer To Free
Everybody wants to live how they wanna live and
Everybody wants to love how they wanna love and
Everybody wants to be closer to free
Everybody wants respect, just a little bit
And everybody needs a chance once in a while
Everybody wants to be closer to free
Everybody one, everybody two, everybody free
Everybody needs to touch, you know now and then and
Everybody wants a good good friend
Everybody wants to be closer to free
I said everybody one, everybody two, everybody free
Everybody wants to live like they wanna live
And everybody wants to love like they wanna love
And everybody wants to be closer to free
Closer to free
Closer to free
Closer to free
4 thoughts on “July 3rd”
Oh Jerry, almost right but not quite there. Yes I think it is okay for a woman to have an abortion, however the decision of Row v Wade, 50 years ago, was wrongly founded. The Constitution says nothing about abortion so the court should not have ruled on it then. It’s a matter of law, not what I or anyone else wants. States will most likely rule on abortion, some for, some against, and some with restrictions. I’d like to see no action at all, just leave it alone, but they won’t.
I agree with Gary. Abortion prohibition is forced labor and should have been decided under the Thirteenth Amendment.
Section 1
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Duly convicted of being female…..
A reply that is late is perhaps better than no reply to the imminent deprivation of half of our citizens of the right of final decision over their reproductive health.
Women, under the protection of the Roe v Wade, decided whether to carry a pregnancy to full term, with some regulation depending on the state of residence. Now, you are approving of the Supreme Court decision which has immediate consequence of removing the say of women, arguably half of our citizenry, according to the whims of a considerable number of state legislatures. You praise a ruling effecting the pragmatic result of removing what was moral, personal, the most intimate-sacrosanct, control over one’s body, and this with a clear, unencumbered knowledge of the consequence for women, especially those who are poor, in those “red” states… So what, if Roe was wrongly founded — it was the right ruling, leaving matters of reproductive health by and large in the realm of moral choice for females.
The realm of the moral, has everything to do with what each of us wants, and such as this (pregnancy) is unambiguously in that “playing field.” What you want, what I want is more foundational than the legal, the minimalist agreed upon rules, within which our society operates. My head is yet spinning, that you are making common cause with the “sky-god” crowd, who will oppress, restrict female freedom, because god-tells-them-so. Whether one is a religious fundamentalist or a constitutional fundamentalist the attitude and resultant behavior is the same.
It comes down to full blown misogyny.