The Prices We Pay

Why is the price we pay for eliminating hatred and evil so steep?

Do you remember the late actor Richard Harris? You might remember him as Albus Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter movies. If you're older, you might also remember him as the English aristocrat and later prisoner in a film by the name of A Man Called Horse (1970), or for his role in film version of the Broadway production of the musical Camelot (1967). There was a time, however, that he was known as much as a singer as he was for his acting roles, and he made the Billboard Singles Charts on six occasions, starting with "MacArthur Park" in 1968.

One of the other times was in 1972, when he released "There Are Too Many Saviors on My Cross", more of a narrative poem set to music than anything. It was found on his LP entitled His Greatest Performances. It came from a poem of the same name published in the only poetry book Harris ever wrote, I, In The Membership of My Days, which was also published in 1972.

The various place names, the "Orange" and the "Green," and the fact that Harris was Irish, make it obvious his specific subject was the bitter conflict between Protestant (orange) and Catholic (green) in Northern Ireland. He spoke out quite frequently on his frustrations with that conflict, which had spawned so much hatred and taken so many lives, and mostly in the apparent name of religious differences.
Like all great poetry though, it rings true in a much broader context.

There Are Too Many Saviors on My Cross
Written & Performed by Richard Harris.
There are too many saviors on my cross,
lending their blood
to flood out my ballot box
with needs of their own.
Who put you there?
Who
told you that was your place?
You carry me secretly naked in your heart,
and clothe me publicly in armor,
crying God is on our side.
Yet
I openly cry
who is on mine?
Who?
You who bury your sons and cripple your fathers,
whilst you bury my Father in crippling his son.
The antiquated Saxon sword,
rusty in its scabbard of time now rises.
You gave it cause in my name
bringing shame to the thorned head
that once bled for your salvation.
I hear your daily cries
in the far-off byways in your mouth
pointing
north and south,
and my cavalry looms again,
desperate
in rebirth.
Your earth is partitioned,
but in contrition
it is the partition in your hearts
that you must abolish.
You
nightly watchers of Gethsemane,
who sat through my nightly trial,
delivering me from evil,
now deserted.
I watch you share your silver,
your purse rich in hate,
bleeds my veins of love,
shattering my bone
in the dust of the Bogside and the Shankhill Road.
There is no issue stronger
than the tissue of love,
no need
as holy
as the palm outstretched
in the run of generosity;
no monstrosity greater
than the acre you inflict
Who gave you the right to increase your fold,
and
decrease the pastors of my flock?
Who gave you the right?
Who gave it to you?
Who?
And in whose name do you fight?
I am not in heaven,
I am here,
hear me.
I am in you,
feel me.
I am of you,
be me.
I am with you,
see me.
I am for you,
need me.
I am all mankind;
only through kindness,
will you reach me.
What masked
and bannered men
can rock the ark
and navigate a course
to their anointed kingdom come?
Who sailed their captain
to waters
that they troubled in my font,
sinking in the ignorant seas of prejudice.
There is no virgin willing
to conceive in the heat
of any bloody Sunday.
You crippled children,
lying in cries
on Derry's streets,
pushing your innocence
to the full flush face
of Christian guns
(battling the blame on each other).
Do not grow tongues
in your dying dumb wounds speaking my name;
I am not your prize.
In your death,
you have exorcised me in your game of politics.
Go home to your knees,
and worship me in any cloth,
as I was never tailor-made.
Who told you I was?
Who gave you the right to think it?
Take your beads
in your crippled hands;
can you count my decades?
Take my love in your crippled hearts;
can you count the loss?
I am not Orange,
I am not Green;
I am a half-ripe fruit
needing both colors
to grow into ripeness.
Shame on you to have withered my orchard.
I
in my poverty
alone
without trust
cry
shame on you!
Shame on you again and again,
for
converting me into a bullet,
and shooting me into men's hearts.
The ageless legend of my trial grows old
in the youth of your pulse,
staggering shamelessly from barricade to grave,
filing in the book of history.
My needless death one April
let me,
in my betrayal,
lie low in my grave,
and you in your bitterness
lie low in yours,
for our measurements grow strangely dissimilar.
Our Father, who art in heaven,
sullied be thy name!

By Richard Harris, from I, In The Membership of My Days, Random House, New York, 1972. The CD release of this narrative can be found on Disc 2 of My Boy/Slides, a 2005 release which has limited availability.
Late in his life, Richard Harris offered a strong performance as as Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in the blockbuster Gladiator (2000), and he became known to an entirely new generation of film fans as Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone(2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002). His final screen role was as Lucius Sulla in Julius Caesar (2002). He passed away from Hodgkin's Disease on October 25, 2002.

• Note: The above is an edited and updated version of a column that I posted elsewhere on 11/02/2006, but the message in the narrative poem seems to still ring all too true today.

- 30 -

Making the World a Better Place

If you could change three things in the world, what would they be and why?

We all complain about things that we would like to change, be they small or large, so this should be pretty easy. Here's my list:

1. Make veteran issues a national priority. We have far too many veterans who are living in poverty in this country, and unfortunately, the words “homeless” and “veterans” are often linked together. “One in three homeless are honorably discharged veterans,” said Kathleen Scott, domiciliary case manager for the Charlie Norwood Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center in Augusta, GA. These people have served our country well in times of need, and are often forgotten or even scorned by some. November 11th is Veterans Day, the anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I in 1918. Do something locally to honor these folks, and write your senators and representatives, letting them know how you feel about this issue. 
   
   As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.
   ~ John Fitzgerald Kennedy 
       
2. Discrimination in this country has to end...period. Gender, racial and ethnic discrimination have no place in this great land, a nation of immigrant minorities and Native Americans. If you have children, educate them and teach them from pre-school age that discrimination and racism are just wrong. 
    
   I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
   ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
     
3. Get Congress to get their butts in gear regarding our ongoing global financial crisis. Recently Donald Kohn, the vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, noted that global financial regulators have more work to do together to address problems discovered during the banking crisis. There are new regulations on banks deemed too-big-to-fail that will only work if the higher standards are coordinated internationally. There has to be better information sharing across borders,according to Kohn, or countries might become wary of allowing international banks access to their consumers. This isn't just an issue of bailing out General Motors and other manufacturers with more bureaucratic boondoggles, it's a situation that effects every woman, and and child internationally. 
    
   Social Security is effected here in the US. The administration wants to give Social Security recipients a one-time payout of $250 apiece to offset the anticipated lack of a cost-of-living increase in Social Security benefits next year. It might be good politics, as older Americans vote in larger numbers than any other demographic, and it pays to keep them happy. But the payoff would cost between $13 billion and $14 billion, adding to our ever-growing deficit. The deficit is effecting all of us, and it's our children that will have to pay the bill if it continues, a horrible legacy to leave for them. 
    
   Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
   ~ Mark Twain 
     
4. Tax churches just like a business. I know that I'm going to catch heat on this one, but hear me out. Some so-called churches are merely fronts for their own business interests, and without naming them here, some of those so-called "religious institutions" are nothing but tax-free fronts for highly profitable business systems. If they were taxed under this concept, they would also have the option of doing acts of public good (feeding the homeless, providing shelters, building homes for the indigent, etc) which would be accountable just as is any regular business. 
    
   Scientology, how about that? You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race. How's that for a religion?
   ~ Frank Zappa, to a concert audience at the Rockpile, Toronto, May 1969

If you want to list more than three things that you would change, feel free to do so. Then pick fifteen or twenty of your friends and send this to them and see how they feel as well. And feel free to comment on the list with your own feelings of what you might change.

• The above was also published on Facebook in a slightly different form on Thursday, October 29, 2009

http://extrovertic.blogspot.com/2009/09/sometimes-way-to-peoples-hearts-is.html

http://extrovertic.blogspot.com/2009/09/sometimes-way-to-peoples-hearts-is.html

Punk Granny Speaks!

A very prim and proper British grandmother introduces a BBC show dealing with punk rock by previewing the off-color words that might appear in the program.

“Hello ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” the sweet-looking granny begins, “I thought that you might like to know… in the spirit of punk rock, the following show includes, what we often refer to as language. So if, like me, you are offended by such words and phrases as: arse; bollocks; tit, wank...”

And she continues. You'll just have to listen to her yourself to get the full impact of this somewhat hilarious video.

Got to love British television!

Technorati Tags: punk granny, British TV, BBC, humor, profanity, JargonTalk, words

The Real Nightmare Before Christmas

It's Black Friday.

You're off of work today, so you get up a little late. Still in your pajamas, you take a few minutes preparing your coffee, as you want to enjoy it today. You grab a quick bite to eat, take a cup of your fresh coffee and head to the couch, where you turn the television on... and that's when you see that it's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, and one of the busiest retail shopping days of the year. This was also the day that you swore you would avoid, fighting the crowds, frequenting the busy stores and malls.

You hear the announcer explain how the term "Black Friday" originated in Philadelphia in reference to the heavy traffic on that day. Two people are now talking about the economy, and how the term has been used more recently by the media in reference to the beginning of that period in which retailers are "in the black" (i.e., turning a profit). And then they break to all of the sale ads.

You just can't resist. You put down that home-brew coffee, get into some clothes and hustle down to Target (or Wal-Mart or Kmart if you like), where you can join all the rest of the Black Friday bargain shoppers and see all of the things that everyone has already picked through and left in shambles. You can stop by the fast food section and get another cup of coffee to make up for the one you left, noticing that it looks rather like weak tea and has a distinctive odor that's definitely not that of fresh brewed coffee.

So you join all of the other Black Friday bargain shoppers, with your expectations of finding anything worthwhile diminishing by the minute. Within the first thirty minutes in the store, you've been bumped by four shopping carts, nearly slipped in the aisle once as you were trying to avoid some strange green liquid as it spread across the aisle, shoved by two kids who were running and shooting Nerf guns at each other, and narrowly escaped the flying projectiles from a barfing baby.

 

But bravely you weather it all, and continue your quest. And then you find that one single item that somehow doesn't have a torn box or look like it was trampled by earlier shoppers. Smiling, you take it and head to the register, though you're aware that there's sure to be a line.

There are lines at each register, and as fortune would have it, you get caught behind one of those shoppers with a full cart who also has two screaming and drooling infants with her, and then you hear her profane remarks about how badly everything sucks as she unloads her cart and smacks her kids. And as you wait for the cashier (a trainee, as luck would have it) ring up the items very slowly, you would feel a sense of light at the end of the tunnel as the shopper's last couple items go into the bags as she curses at her kids.

Then, just when relief is in sight, the shopper presents the cashier with her credit card, and there is a pause of a minute or so... and all of her purchases are declined. In a burst of profanity, the shopper whips out another credit card and the cashier helps her with it, because the line behind all of you is really growing now. The noises behind you sound like the buzzing of a distant hornet's nest that has been poked and is beginning to swarm. But what happens next is almost predictable at this point: that credit card is declined as well.

Of course now the shopper begins to loudly berate the credit card company, the economy in general, the store, foreign workers who have "stolen good American jobs," and the "incompetence" of the cashier, with rude expletives bursting forth in rapid succession, and variations of the term "suck" seems to make up about every fifth work. Alternatives of another "-uck" term are used at an increasing rate, and "duck" is not the expletive.

About then the trainee cashier bursts into tears, and the people behind you begin to yell at both the rude shopper with her screaming kids and the poor cashier, who is now really sobbing... and you're caught there, squeezed as if in a vice, right there in the middle of all this pandemonium.

Poof!

You wake up and blink, startled to see that you're still there in your pajamas, and that you had just dozed off for a moment. So you take a sip of your home-brew coffee, smiling gratefully that it was all a nightmare, albeit a real one that many are going through at that precise moment.

You get up and turn on your computer, smiling as you go to that familiar Amazon.com bookmark. Yes, Black Friday shopping here is a lot more fun!

And yes, I'm right here, enjoying it all.

Technorati Tags: black friday, shopping, amazon.com, sales, lexidiem, jargontalk, computer, online shopping, buzznet