Love Will Keep us Alive,–The Last Festival
Friday July 1st, the holiday weekend begins. We made our way to Kraklauer Park. Annually our town holds a four day community festival on the spacious lawn adjacent to Santa Maria church. A big circus-sized tent is pitched and filled with picnic tables. Outside is a lineup of local food vendors. I walked over to Brothers’ BBQ and saw Greg manning the big gas grill. We exchanged greetings. I’ve known Greg for years. A boneless rib sandwich, a serving of fried cheese curds, and a diet coke in hand, I continued to a table just inside the tent. We ate opposite the big performance stage 
across the lawn in front of us. The band R-Gang from Chicago was laying down a tight blues groove and the harmonies of the two male vocalists were exquisite. They segued into The Tears of A Clown, Smokey Robinson’s song, famous since I was in high school. It was as if the story of my life, indeed of our lives as one people, were inscribed into lyric, tune, and harmony. The moment became sacred, time stood still, and I forgot all else but the inexpressable truth of life.
Now if I appear to be carefree
It’s only to camouflage my sadness
And honey to shield my pride I try
To cover this hurt with a show of gladness
But don’t let my show convince you
That I’ve been happy since you
‘Cause I had to go (why did you go), oh I need you so (I need you so)
Look I’m hurt and I want you to know (want you to know)
For others I put on a show (it’s just a show)
It is wildly improbable that you and I are alive here and now. Chance, serendipity, fortune…….. Yet we forget, screw things up, seriously, badly. We end up throwing life away.
The country anticipates electing a new President in November. The female candidate of the Democratic Party is despised by many in the opposing party. The candidate of the Republican Party is a huckster, a con man who openly proposes violent solutions for perceived problems with immigration and trade. In our State of Illinois, for years the legislators have conned the public into believing a deal “too good to be true.” The unfunded pension liabilities will break over the tax payer like a cat. 5 hurricane. A great storm is coming.
The Mundelein community festival of 2016 stands as a way marker, a vector of what we might be,–even if it is the last festival.
4 thoughts on “Love Will Keep us Alive,–The Last Festival”
Ours is certainly a culture in decline. I think a persuasive case can be made for thoughtful persons that the astonishing successes of both Trump and Sanders is a direct result of how Obama has polarized the country with identity politics in a way unseen since the original civil rights movement. Many conservatives countenance or cheer Trump’s behavior because they have had enough of trying to reason with things like “politically correct speech” and race-baiting tactics by so many with ulterior motives. As for Hilary, given the FBI director’s thrashing of her “extreme” recklessness and the culture she allowed to develop at the State department during her time as tenure, I think it’s clear to all that as opposed to Trump’s inarticulate buffoonery she represents the kind of hyper-calculated self-serving deception in politics definitive of the most pejorative adjective in the entire Western tradition: “Machiavellian.”
Joe, as always you are not one to shade your point. Whether one believes that Obama has divided the country depends on where one happens to live. Seems to me that the country has been increasingly divided for quite some time. My sense is that by comparison to the years when I was a young adult the margins of society have been pushed to the edge of the page. There is less and less room to move, to find one’s niche, to develop a stake. This is especially the case if one is not a well educated white male. I feel great loss when I contemplate this reality. This is the society which we all have constructed. We are fools to keep singing the old patriotic songs believing literally that this is the best of all possible worlds. I sing the old songs, but with irony and sadness. And no, I cannot lay this at the feet to the man in the White House.
Yes, I would certainly agree with you that our current political situation is the consequence of the foolishness of decades of corrupt politicians in both political parties. Nonetheless, I think that a persuasive case can be made that Obama’s failure of leadership is particularly unique in both breadth and depth.
On this subject I think you would find the book by Ronald Pestritto (a former professor of mine) titled Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism very interesting. The extent to which Wilson explicitly envisioned universities and media outlets to become what he referred to as “the fourth estate [branch] of government” and pivotal in reorienting American government government away from the philosophy of natural-rights toward the (Hegelian) philosophy of history is simply astonishing.
It’s easy to make Obama the focal point of the deconstruction that almost everyone is forced to witness/endure due to the replay of video in the media. Disaster and negative stories follow upon one another; mass killings, climate events, raging elected politicians, and insolvent institutions of government.
Obama is the “help” who is supposed to stay in the kitchen. How did it happen that he is seated at the head of the table….? I feel empathy for him, even when I happen to disagree with elements of his actions. He serves a system that has a life of it’s own. And so will the next president, whoever he or she happens to be.