Upon Watching Frank Turner Sing a Song to a Crowd That Wasn’t Listening

 “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet black bough.” – Ezra Pound

Everyone is here, huddled up under the golden glow of the marquee, taking obligatory selfies with the illuminated words SOLD OUT floating like halos above their heads. There’s no typecasting the crowd tonight – aging punks with their patch-worked proclamations safety pinned to faded hoodies, grunge-era Gen Xers rocking their torn up flannels and baggy jeans, and the ubiquitous hipsters decked out in their thrift store pleather and ironic moustaches. We’re all jumbled up and sharing the same giddy excitement while we wait in the long line for hand stamps and the neon pink wristbands that will get us up to the bar, where the punks will take their whiskey straight and the hipsters will fork over $8 a can for the same terrible piss-tasting Pabst Blue Ribbon tallboys we used to steal from our big brothers and drink behind the hockey rink back in high school.

The warm-up acts are solid and do their layman’s work well, playing long just enough to build the anticipation, but not so long to get beer bottles hurled at them. Frank takes the stage at the perfect moment and we roar our approval, pressing forward when he launches into one of the big ones – an anthem like so many of his songs – exhorting us to live these unfettered, openhearted lives. This is what we love about him, that he can make us feel this way, that he can lift us up to a place where we feel like we can do big things and be so much better than we are. He is a master showman, too, breathing new life into tired and well-worn stage antics like: Just yell the name of the city you’re in! Have half the crowd sing one part and the other half sing the other! Talk about the first run down rat hole club you ever played in this city! Somehow he manages to do these things with sincerity and humor. We’re eating it up and singing every word. He has us in the palm of his hand.

We know the set lists and the trajectory by heart. We can feel the cathartic crescendo coming. This is why we came tonight – to hear what comes next.

But the triumphant, crunching power chords and piercing snare drum shots don’t come.

Instead, a droning, dissonant Roland organ fades in like a train approaching from somewhere far away. He closes his eyes and hesitantly begins to sing, his face pained and drawn, his fists clenched and held at his sides. There is no discernable melody or structure, just his groping, uncertain words… as I walked out one morning fair, I found myself drawn thoughtlessly, back to the place we used to live, and you still do, now without me… he is pouring them out like blood from an open wound, like they are the last things he would say with his very last breaths.

But the crowd doesn’t seem to notice.

They don’t recognize this song. It isn’t what they came to hear. They’ve gone back to their loud conversations and moronic hashtags.  They’ve bee-lined for the bathrooms and the bar… I have wandered around this city, like a child lost in the London fog… in this moment he is a broken man singing his heart out to an empty room, but no matter how desperately he sings, they can’t seem to hear him… I’ve had time enough to think upon, the question of what kind of songs you would choose to listen to, now that I am gone… there, in front of a thousand other souls, he appears utterly alone.

Yet as I look across the crowd, I can see amidst the oblivious and distracted masses a small handful of others held in rapt attention, serving silent witness to this public confession… so I sat down in sadness beneath your window, and I played sad songs on the minor keys of a broken piano, a sinner amongst saved men… just in front of me a grizzled, pierced, and heavily inked old punk stands with his arms crossed and his jaw set hard, tears just faintly shimmering at the corners of his eyes.

The song slowly winds its way to a close, barely audible over the maddening, murmuring din. Frank’s not done yet. He’s got two just more lines to sing before he’s finished … but as I stroked those broken keys… you did not join in harmony…

As we spill back out onto the sidewalk I wish, more than anything, that I had the power to identify each of those who had been listening. I want to tell them that I was listening, too. I want us to make a pact that we will watch out for each other from now on because the risks, for us, are so much greater in this life. I want us to promise to stick together because we’re so much more vulnerable to feeling completely alone.

And while we’re at it we should probably send a note to Frank to thank him for the song.

So he knows that someone was listening.

 

Breaking Brave

I was trolling the news feed per usual this morning, wading through the daily litany of clever quips, obnoxious reposts (“like” if you agree!), kid pictures, pet pictures, food pictures, inspirational quotes (the posting of which I am a chronic offender) and the like, when I came across this status update from an old friend:

I have recently come to terms with the fact that I have bipolar disorder. I see now that it has been plaguing me my whole life and doing damage to those I love most. Took my first step towards changing that today. I’m getting help. It’s going to be a long road. Thank you to those who have been there for me.

A simple statement, really – a message so basically earnest that it could easily suffer the swift and certain fate intrinsic to the billion other digital updates and proclamations pushing through the feeds, each one bumping the last into cyber-oblivion, someone’s deepest confession briefly replaced by an Instagram of someone else’s delicious garlic mashed potatoes – before they are both buried in the information graveyard forever. This one stuck with me, though, long after it had been replaced by the latest moronic thing Ted Cruz had to say about, well, just about anything and the new Buzzfeed list, “13 Telltale Signs You’re Stuck in the 90’s.” (I’m listening to Pearl Jam while I write this, so… yeah)

Apropos though, since I think this all started for us back then – back during the time when we were the ones to shake off the shallow indulgences of the 80’s and reclaim some of that righteous anger that had faded as all the hardcores OD’d or burned out and all the straightedges grew up. Maybe grunge didn’t save rock ‘n roll, or maybe it ruined it, but it led us back to Minor Threat and Black Flag and The Clash and everything else that made us feel angry and broken and brilliant and saved all at the same time. We weren’t riding the bleachers at the pep rally; we were walking the rusty beams of abandoned bridges, suspended and suspect, using the dizzy edges to measure our will and our worth.

It’s a miracle we lived through it. Yet, in the years between then and now, we haven’t been without casualties. We’ve watched each other be broken, one by one, in ways both subtle and spectacular. When Tony died, I made a drunken backyard bonfire of my old journals and poetry books and sent their ashes swirling into the sky – to try to shake the stubbornly clinging past – the one that would never let me back away from the ledge we once peered over together. But that aching urgency was burned into us to begin with, and no fire could ever consume it.

For better or for worse, this is who we are.

Which is why, my old friend, your update from this morning hit me so hard. While I’m still playing the tortured poet and grasping at ghosts, you’ve made the tougher choice – to look up and live on. Picking a fight with your demons is one of the hardest things we can do in this life, but you never were one to shy away from a challenge. I remember you standing under those stage spotlights and belting out your lines years ago.  I want you to know how brave I thought you were back then. I want you to know how brave I think you are right now.  And I want you to know I think you’ll win.

Aflame

Over the past few weeks, the maple down the street has changed from dingy, faded summer’s-end green to splendorous burnt orange and crimson, like blood and fire against the azure autumn sky. Every year it sparks in me a memory, or maybe something deeper than a memory; an image emblazoned in the archives of my past, filed away but far from forgotten.

There was a massive maple tree just like this one on the winding avenue that led up the hill to the house where I grew up. Every year it would ignite with the same impossible colors before yielding its leaves to the unrelenting autumn winds. I biked past it hundreds of times as a kid, returning from some friend’s house or some adventure deep in the woods, then drove past it hundreds more as a teenager, coming back from some keg-strewn bonfire in some gravel pit outside the city limits, racing to get home before curfew.

It isn’t just the image that has lingered with me, though, but all of the longing and turmoil spilling over at every moment in those days. I used to wear an old canvas army surplus jacket in the fall, full of rips and bloodstains and cigarette burns – each one hard-earned. I walked its threads like tightropes, dancing while they frayed beneath my feet. We were all so close to the edge back then and we wanted to be – to see just how close we could come, how much we could feel, how much beauty and pain and inspiration and heartbreak we could take.

I always felt those things the most in the fall, when somehow the world dying all around made me feel like I was being reborn.

But those flames have turned to embers now, glowing faintly beneath the years and layers of habit and routine. I’m not sure it’s possible to ever feel anything as intensely as we do when we’re young – or if we do, maybe it’s us who can’t last. After all, we’ve already said goodbye to some friends who tried to walk that edge for too long.

Last time I was back in the old neighborhood, I saw that they had chopped that old maple down, removing the last landmark by which I had tried to navigate my way back to the wild heart that used to beat in my chest. I sat at the stop sign blinking slowly, trying to make it reappear, until the honking of the cars behind me tore me from my reverie. For a split second, I swear I could see its jagged outline in the rear view mirror as I drove away.

This autumn is warmer and later than it should be, with the leaves in my neighborhood just starting to change and clinging tenaciously to the trees. All except the maple down the block, that is. It hasn’t been willing to wait for the colder weather to set itself aflame. It glows and burns like a personal protest against the slow death of winter it knows will come far too soon.

Though I know it, too, I just can’t seem to burn like that anymore. But I’ve still got those embers glowing somewhere inside of me, and I’ve still got a chance…

Kevin Ware and the Nature of Healing

It was sickening to watch.  Midway through the first half of Sunday’s epic Louisville vs. Duke Elite Eight basketball game, Cardinals guard Kevin Ware went up to contest a routine 3-pointer from Duke’s Tyler Thornton.

When he came down, he suffered one of the most horrific injuries in college basketball history, shattering his lower leg so badly that his broken tibia tore right through his skin.  With the crowd sitting in stunned silence and traumatized teammates sprawled on the court weeping, television announcers struggled for any words to convey the weight of what had just happened.  Louisville coach Rick Pitino wiped away tears as he pulled the team into a close huddle around their fallen teammate who, before they carted him out of the arena and rushed him to the emergency room, had only one thing to say:  “Don’t worry about me.  I’ll be okay.  You guys go win this thing.”  And win they did.  But, as brave an exhortation as it was, and as epic a victory as it produced, it couldn’t change the tough reality facing Kevin Ware.

In a split second, his young life had changed forever.

In the days since, I have been as obsessed as anyone with Kevin’s injury and recovery, following every tweet and update about his surgery, about the steel rod they put in his leg, about how he was already up on crutches the next day, about how he will travel with his team to his hometown of Atlanta for the Final Four.  Like so many others, I pumped my fist when I read his New York Daily News quote:  “This is a minor setback for a major comeback.”

The kid’s got an amazing attitude and, by most accounts, could be playing again in a year.  In between now and then undoubtedly lie some of the hardest days Kevin Ware will ever experience, not only building his physical strength back, but also learning to trust his leg again – an emotional aspect of recovery that many athletes say is far more difficult than the rehabilitation itself.  Even though their post-surgery bones and ligaments may be even stronger than they were before, the residual trauma of having suffered a serious injury won’t allow them to believe it.  It is only through repeated testing and retesting that they begin to regain their confidence and learn to trust the strength of their repaired bodies; no small task when every plant and pivot and jump feels just like the one that caused the injury and their brain is telling them to do anything to avoid feeling that kind of pain again.

Kevin Ware is going to have overwhelming support from millions of people as he makes his journey from injury to recovery, as millions of us have now been public witnesses to his pain.  We cannot un-see what we saw and we won’t soon forget it.  Though the struggle will be his own, he certainly won’t be going it alone.  He’ll have Lebron and the rest tweeting their well wishes at him every step of the way, and he’ll have all of our thoughts and prayers to pick him up along the way.  As well it should be for a great kid in the midst of a comeback, not just in basketball but in a troubled life as well.

As I’ve been trying to wipe the terrible image of Kevin Ware’s leg folding obscenely under him, replayed twice in slow motion on CBS before they quickly pulled it, from my mind ever since I saw it.  There is something so indescribably awful about the way it ended up jutted out at nearly a right angle, skewed to one side, bones sticking through flesh.  Such severe and grotesque injuries may bring out our worst gawker tendencies but they also compel us to be compassionate.  I would bet there wasn’t a single person in Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday who wasn’t sending that kid every ounce of love and prayer they could muster, even the most rabid of the Duke fans.

Despite our love of competition, there is still something inside of us that can’t tolerate suffering.

But that thing, whatever it is – that instinct that drives us to rally around the fallen only engages when we are able to perceive pain.  Kevin Ware’s pain was in our faces in a manner so real that we couldn’t possibly ignore or escape it.  We could see his pain reflected in his mangled leg.  We could hear it in his cries.

The trouble for us, though, is that most of our injuries are hidden from view.

All of this has me wondering how much differently we would treat each other if all of the pain we carry around inside of us suddenly became visible to the world.  What if we could tell that our rude waiter just had his heart broken into a million pieces or that our conflict-averse boss had been abused as a child?  What if we could see our emotional scars the same way as cuts or broken bones?  Would we treat each other with the same empathy and compassion as a college basketball star with a badly broken leg?

Call me naïve, but I really think we would.

So, as we root for Kevin Ware to come back stronger than ever, let’s remember to root for each other, too.

Our hearts, after all, can take an awfully long time to heal.

Our Daily Protest

The last few weeks have been, in many ways, the kind of weeks I love most – full of big projects and big risks, tight deadlines and public spotlights.  They have found me in Capitol hallways and hearing rooms, but also in community centers and church basements, sitting on cold metal folding chairs sipping countless cups of lukewarm coffee and listening to the true stories of people’s lives, told so openly and earnestly that they make my own fastidiously constructed narrative feel like a fable.  I love the feeling of momentum and purpose, love the moments of commitment and connection when groups of people decide to link arms and take up a cause, love when the young ones get that first notion that their lives could mean something bigger than themselves, love when the elders rouse their tired and battle-weary bones for one more good fight.  It’s times like these when there’s no denying how blessed I am to be living this life and doing this work, when my eyes are clear and my heart is full.

As they always tend to be, though, the highs have been counterbalanced by lows – in the unfortunately coupled forms of cynical calculation and petty undercutting – sometimes even by those I’ve stood with for years in their own struggles.  What I’ve come to understand is that the perception of scarcity – the notion that if someone else gets something you won’t get yours – can make people act in some really terrible ways sometimes.  And lest you think I’m climbing up on my self-righteous soapbox, dear reader, let me assure you that I have been this person, too, slicing and carving my way to “victory”, leaving the tattered remains of relationships along the way.

It’s not difficult to see why this is such a pervasive pattern, not just in politics and public life, but also in our most intimate relationships.  Suspicion, dysfunction, and competition are the three core principles upon which most of our modern entertainment is based.  They seep into our collective consciousness whether we know it or not.  They turn us into people who value kindness yet revel in degradation.  It’s no wonder we start to believe that the only way to succeed is to destroy each other in the process.

I don’t believe it’s too late for us, though, and I don’t believe this is really who we are – and I certainly don’t believe we were meant to live this way.

So, here’s what I’m going to try to do starting today:  I’m going to believe the best about people.  I’m going to believe that most people, if given the chance, will choose to do good in the world.  I’m going to believe that the versions of ourselves who give comfort to strangers and pray for people we’ve never even met during times of crisis are stronger than the ones who tear each other down for our own gains.  I’m going to believe that our collective humanity is bigger than our individual insecurity.

I’m going to believe these things even if I’m proven wrong time and again.  Even if I get taken advantage of and called naive.  Even if I get hurt.

Of all of the mini-revolutions I’ve tried to start over the years, this is probably the only one that really matters in the end – the one without spotlights or strategy, notoriety or name.  It won’t require endless coalition meetings or multimillion dollar budgets or reams of research on the opposition.  It won’t even require us to sign a pledge or a petition.

But it will require us to believe the best about each other – stubbornly, genuinely, perhaps naively – in the face of so much erroneous evidence that we shouldn’t.  And it will bind us to act accordingly.

A simple agreement serving as our daily protest.

Being Joe Webb

My wife and I were in Phoenix for a wedding this past weekend but, belonging to the unlucky and unenviable class of humans known as “Vikings fans”, managed to find an appropriately townie, every-person’s-bar called the “Draw 10” off 202 in Tempe to watch the big Vikings vs. Packers playoff game.  We should have known from the moment we walked in the door and saw some guy wearing a throwback #84 Randy Moss jersey that the football gods were feeling ambivalent about our chances.  Just like Randy, you never know which version of our team will come out to play – the one that will dazzle us with superhuman acts of athleticism or the one that doesn’t feel like blocking on this particular night and only runs half its routes.  Over ogre-sized plates of unholy local concoctions like mac ‘n cheese with pork and green chilies slathered over the top, we cautiously assessed our chances as “not good, but it could happen.”  (As long-time Vikings fans, any faint flicker of optimism is quickly snuffed out by painful memories of things like Favre throwing a last-minute pick when ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS RUN 3 YARDS AND FALL DOWN TO SET UP THE GAME-WINNING FIELD GOAL.  SERIOUSLY?)

Adding to our anxiousness (of course, because they are EVERYWHERE) were two rabid Packers fans just down the bar from us, grunting and bellowing their predictably extensive list of reasons they lost the last game to us – none of which ever seem to have anything to do with how crappy they played, mind you.  Though they had executed the perfect game, it would seem from their analysis, the refs were both blind and involved in some widespread conspiracy, possibly funded by the Minnesota soybean industry, not only to eradicate Wisconsin cheese products from the face of the earth, but also to cheat the Packers out of another well-deserved victory.  In what I thought was a magnanimous gesture of reconciliation and goodwill, I tilted my colossal dish of cheesy mac in their general direction to signal my sympathy for their cause, but no dice.  These two were out for blood.

Beyond any conspiracy-fueled Cheesehead animosity, though, we did have some real cause for concern in the form of one Joe Webb, our backup quarterback who, despite having thrown exactly ZERO passes in a regular season game this year, was green-lighted just 90 minutes before the game due to Christian Ponder’s “sore elbow.” (Don’t get me started on this, please.  Despite his strong propensity to throw the ball to the other team, Favre once jammed his own dislocated finger back into the socket and went back into the game without missing a single play.  But yes, by all means Christian, take care of the owie on your elbow.)  Despite our concerns, though, we were buoyed by the commentator chatter about how Joe’s presence would open up the magical world of the “read option”, thus rendering the Packers defense utterly stupefied and unable to decide whether to rush the quarterback or to hang back and wait to be unceremoniously flattened by Adrian Peterson.  And there was Joe on the screen, looking ripped and confident, keeping it nice and loose for the prime-time cameras.  Could it be possible?  The first drive looked promising as Joe and AP one-two-punched their way down the field to a Blair Walsh field goal.  Maybe, we thought.  Just maybe.

Sadly, those 3 points were the last ones we would see until the waning moments of the 4^th quarter and, by then, it was far too late to make up the 3 touchdown deficit we’d chalked up.  The Packers would have their sweet revenge and the Vikings would bolster their reputation as one of the chokiest teams in the NFL.  And then there was Joe Webb, who played one of the most epically terrible games in recent memory – the kind of game that, if you have an empathetic bone in your body, changed rapidly from frustrating to just plain uncomfortable, like watching your kid forget his lines in the school play.  He really couldn’t have been much worse.  He overthrew his receivers by 15 yards.  He tossed the ball straight up in the air in an attempt to avoid being sacked.  He dropped back in the pocket when he should have stepped up.  He got picked off.  He fumbled and groped his way through 4 quarters of truly, embarrassingly awful football.

As I was yelling “YOU SUCK, WEBB” at the TV screen for the 89^th time, however, I started to feel a just a little bit bad.  I mean, here was a guy who hadn’t taken a single snap all season, now expected to lead a, let’s face it, mediocre-at-best team through the Wild Card (at Lambeau, no less) and into the playoffs.  It’s hard to understand that kind of pressure.  I’m sitting here on the plane ride back home to Minnesota while I write this, imagining the flight attendant coming over the speaker and saying something like: “The pilot just developed a wicked case of carpal tunnel syndrome.  Has anyone here ever used a flight simulator or played a video game where you had to fly an airplane?  If so, can you please come up to the cockpit?  We’re going to need you to land this thing.”

Before you get all mad at me, let me be the first to admit that it seems like a professional athlete making millions of dollars should be capable of actually playing the game for which he is getting (over) paid.  But, just for a moment, imagine yourself as a kid, playing in your backyard and being your own announcer while you try to throw your football through the tire swing…it’s 4^th and goal, there’s only three seconds left on the clock.  A touchdown will send them to the Superbowl; anything else will send them home.  He takes the snap and drops back.  He’s got three receivers on the corners.  Here comes the blitz!  He spins and gets away!  He scrambles.  He throws.  TOUCHDOWN!  THE VIKINGS ARE GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL.  I CAN’T BELIEVE IT!!!

You know Joe did that, too, probably thousands of times, dreaming of getting his one shot on the big stage – his chance to be a hero.  When he finally did, he failed.  And not just by a hair either.  He completely and very publicly collapsed under the pressure.  In the annals of sports history, he won’t be celebrated as the most unlikely of heroes, but as a loser – someone who simply couldn’t hack it under the bright lights.  Or even worse, he won’t be remembered at all – relegated to statistical anonymity somewhere in the archived files of the ESPN sports supercomputer.

In other words, it can’t be easy being Joe Webb right now.

Somewhere between hurling insults at the television and finishing my beer, it occurred to me just how scary it can be to find ourselves suddenly thrown in the spotlight, from the first time we’re called on to solve a math problem in front of the class to that oh-so-awkward rejection by your crush at the junior high dance in front of all your friends.  I think a lot of us learn, early in life, to avoid additional opportunities for public embarrassment.  But in our efforts to do so, we also leave a lot of our bigger dreams untried and unfulfilled.  We learn to play small to avoid losing big.

According to Nielsen, Joe Webb crashed and burned in front of approximately 26 million people on Saturday night.  I suspect, after a tough off-season, he’ll be back at it again, chasing another chance to prove to the world that he’s a real football player.  It takes serious guts, regardless of the salary involved, to step back up and try again.  Most of us wouldn’t do it unless we knew we’d succeed.  But that’s not how we find out how strong we really are.  That’s not how we grow.

So, while most people want to be like Tom Brady or Peyton Manning or Aaron Rogers, count me out.

I’m going to try to be more like Joe.

The Anatomy of American Tragedy

“We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light.” – Plato

As I write this post on January 2, 2013, it has been exactly 19 days since the name “Sandy Hook” brought our lives to a grinding halt and our nation to its knees.  In those excruciatingly slow hours of shock and sadness, and in the days immediately following, we huddled close together in our homes and in our places of worship, made awfully and powerfully aware of the precious nature of what any of us could lose at any moment.  Our Facebook and Twitter feeds lit up with passionate admonitions to “hug your children tonight” and to “pray for those affected by this tragedy.”  For a brief and fleeting period of time, all of us became a bit kinder and more empathetic – more willing to wear each other’s suffering as if it were our own.  This wasn’t new for us, of course.  We’d done it many times before.  We have become, by necessity, a nation that knows how to collectively grieve.

We are also, however, a nation entranced by news cycles.  Like our own internal circadian rhythms, they tell us when to wake up and when to sleep, when to pay attention to which details, and when to move on to the next thing.  They tell us that our shock should last about a day, followed by grief for 2 to 3 more, at least through the funeral footage.  Sprinkled throughout should be a healthy amount of morbid gawkerism around the specific nature of the act – the number of bullets, locations of wounds, where the blood was smeared, who had to walk through it on their way out of the school.  Add to that some jaw-droppingly inappropriate and breathtakingly insensitive interviews with six-year-olds about what the gunshots sounded like and how scared they were.  Temper the tabloid voyeurism with tales of heroes and children’s lives and selfless acts of bravery.  Paint the gunman as an unspeakable monster while, at the same time, run the obligatory “how could this have happened” investigative background story.  Then spend a few more days pouring over the top of the entire occurrence the shrill, eye-bulging commentaries of the left and the right about the appropriate political response and there you have it: The life and death of an American tragedy in the span of a single week.

To be fair, we haven’t totally forgotten about Sandy Hook just yet.  Several stories ran today about the children returning to school and being welcomed back by the familiar face of their formerly retired principal.  It isn’t that these stories aren’t still being written, it’s just that most of us have already stopped paying attention.  For evidential purposes, here is a brief, and by no means exhaustive, list of “top stories” that were either as widely or more widely read than the Sandy Hook story today:

“John Boehner Told Harry Reid ‘Go F— Yourself’ Outside Oval Office” (CNN)

“Wendy’s Moves Past ’99 Cents’ With New Value Menu” (Yahoo)

“Scientologists Alleged “Alien Space Cathedral’ Found” (Yahoo)

“A Look At Justin Bieber’s Non-Music News-Making” (AP)

“Newly Pregnant Kim Kardashian Does New Year’s Eve In A Sheer Dress.” (HuffPo)

“Christie Calls Boehner’s Sandy Decision ‘Disgusting’” (ABC)

“US Has More Internet-Connected Gadgets Than People” (NBC)

“Jennifer Lawrence Says Acting Is ‘Stupid’ (NBC)

Lest you think I’m making an argument for us all to dwell insipidly on Sandy Hook or any other horrific American tragedy, I assure you I am not.  What I am trying to expose is the insidious nature of false equivalencies in our mass-consumed media machine.  It isn’t that Sandy Hook needs to be the only news for weeks and months on end; it’s that we are losing our ability to differentiate its level of importance from any other “news” that gets heaped on top of it – and most of that other news is hardly news at all.

In another week or so, there will be no more Sandy Hook stories since there will be no circus-like courtroom hearing to sentence a dead gunman.  Just like the “fiscal cliff” and Hillary’s blood clot and Bieber’s thoughts on paparazzi-related legal reform, it will fade from our collective consciousness to be replaced by a million other stories produced by the never-ending news cycle.  The next time we hear the words “Sandy Hook” will be on December 14, 2013 when CNN and FOX and MSNBC wedge 30-second remembrances between spots about pregnant celebrities and the latest partisan stalemate.  Unless, of course, there’s another mass shooting between now and then which will, inevitably, be either “the worst mass shooting since Sandy Hook” or “even worse than Sandy Hook” or something along those lines, depending on the tally after the news networks race each other to count the bodies and get the first “confirmed dead” number on air.

I guess all I’m trying to say is that we’re better than this.  We know it, too.  In the face of national tragedy we become who we could be – kinder, more compassionate, more forgiving.  But we forget so soon.  We replace solidarity and empathy with judgment and division.  Instead of holding up love, we revel in dysfunction.  We trade who we could be for who we’ve become.

It shouldn’t take another Sandy Hook to bring us together.  We’ve got it in us to be those people everyday.  So, let the news cycles try to spin without us.  It’s our feet on the pedals after all.

Dreams of Sleeping Gardens

I pulled the dead tomato vines today,
Once taut with life and thirsting,
Swollen, drinking ferric water from the hose,
Droplets and insects dancing amidst delicate, silken hairs,
Now starved and anemic, brittle and broken,
Petrified in positions of grasping and reaching,
Intertwined and frozen in final embraces,
Sculptures of what life was before the killing frost came.

I tugged them by their shallow roots and shook the soil loose,
Then the pepper plants,
Dropping the last of their clinging fruit
onto a blanket of tawny leaves,
Like Christmas ornaments laid out
on the frowzy brown plaid of my parents’ old couch,
Waiting for tattered tissue paper wrappings,
Returned to back of the closet boxes for another year.

The work was not easy,
Vines and tendrils hopelessly tangled,
Through trellises and cages,
Woven into the chain link fence,
Invading the house’s crumbling rubble stone foundation,
Knotted up with each other and themselves,
I couldn’t tell where one ended
and another began.

In the hazy evening half light,
My friend the rabbit emerged,
Out from underneath my trusty, dusty truck,
A place he goes each time I return home,
Seeking residual warmth from the cooling engine.
I worry about him with his crippled hind leg,
An easy target for the prowling neighborhood dogs
and the hawks hungrily circling, searching, overhead.
I’ve thought of bringing him into the house,
But I know a house is no place for a creature like him.

I think I’ll let the yard grow wild next year,
And let my heart grow wild, too.

I think I’ll get rid of the cages.

I think I’ll seek warmer places.

Free and bending toward the light.

Underneath It All

So here I am, 46 hours away from when the polls close, trying to write anything coherent about how I’m feeling about the dueling possibilities that my State of Minnesota could either become the 31st state in the nation to place a permanent ban on same-sex marriage in its constitution, or the first in the nation to send one of these hurtful ballot initiatives to its well-deserved defeat. Bleary-eyed and exhausted from near nonstop campaigning, I’m desperately digging for every last reservoir of energy to push through these last few hours to the finish line. I can’t stand the thought of having anything left in the tank come Tuesday at 8 pm. I won’t let it happen. I promise you that. I will have given all I have to give.

Think about it, friends – what more could we possibly fight for in our lives than the right for everyone to find love and happiness in this lifetime. Of all the causes and campaigns of which I’ve been a part, I can’t imagine a more compelling reason to act. So many people in this world are so profoundly lonely. So many people have never found love, or have lost the ones they love most. So many people go through their entire lives searching for someone to love and someone who will love them back. In the end, it’s all any of us really wants and all we really need.

Yet here we are, staring at the abhorrent possibility that the constitution of our state will serve not as a grantor of freedoms as it was intended, but instead as a permanent barrier to love and happiness for so many people. It’s so hard for me not to get angry and become hateful toward those who would seek to inflict such harm on people under the dubious guise of “protecting marriage.” I will admit, friends, that in my worst moments I have let hatred fill my heart, even in the midst of fighting for love. I’ve lived in this painful irony far too many days lately. It’s been tearing me apart at the seams.

With (now) 45 hours and 22 minutes to go in this election, there’s something I want you all to know – a feeling that’s been welling up in me the past few early mornings as I drive to the campaign office and make my way inside. It started with a mother and daughter who I see almost every morning on my commute; the daughter, who is visibly developmentally disabled, using her hand-pedaled bike to ride around the block, throwing her head back and smiling and shouting with pure joy while the mother patiently walks beside her, beaming at her daughter’s unbridled happiness. Further along, another mother putting her young son on the school bus and lingering until he appears in the window and gives her a wave, a gesture to which she responds with a blown kiss before hurrying to her car to get to work.

Then I get to the campaign office where the first person I see is another mom – one who has spent nearly all day every day calling people across Minnesota to ask them to vote against the marriage amendment. On the desk next to her phone she places a framed picture of her gay son, now serving in the military and soon to be deployed to Afghanistan, and keeps her eyes fixed on him while she calls hundreds and hundreds of people in the hope that she can touch their hearts and change their minds.

Waiting in my office are Chong and Johnny, still in their early twenties and completely, sweetly, madly in love with each other, working their hearts out for the chance to marry each other someday.

I guess what I’m trying to tell you, dear friends, is that there is so much love in all of us. On the days when I don’t give in to anger, when I let myself see with non-judging eyes and feel with an open heart, I know that love is the force that lies underneath it all – all of the arguments and politics and amendments and debates. There aren’t just a bunch of hateful bigots on the other side either, as convenient as it would be for me to believe that. I can’t allow myself to paint them that way, even though I want to. In order to free myself from my own hatred and anger, I need to learn to love them, too.

At 8:01 pm on Tuesday, 44 hours and 57 minutes from now, we will either have a marriage amendment or we won’t. We will either have won or we won’t. But our ultimate purpose is so much bigger than all of that anyway.

To grow love in our hearts and lives. To recognize love in each other. To fight for love- not just for ourselves but for everyone. This is what we must do. This is what we were born to do.

Today. Tomorrow. For all our days remaining.

Paul and Sheila

It has been 10 years since we lost them.

For some of you from other states and other places in the world, it was 10 years ago this week that United States Senator Paul Wellstone and his wife Sheila, a former librarian turned tireless crusader against domestic violence, were killed in a plane crash on a dreary, sleety October morning, just days before the 2002 election.

For many of you reading this, though, October 25, 2002 wasn’t the day that we lost U.S. Senator Wellstone and his wife.  It was the day that we lost our friends, Paul and Sheila.

I worked on Paul’s ’96 reelection campaign as the statewide college campus coordinator, traveling all around the state in to start up Students for Wellstone groups and to register new student voters.  That’s me in the middle of the photo, way back in the day, holding my Wellstone sign high while Paul and Sheila greet the Rondo Days Parade crowd, along with their grandson, from the back of the iconic green bus. What a bunch of crazy kids we were back then.  I always relished the opportunities I had to travel with Paul and Sheila during those days, and to meet up with them on college campuses all around the great state of Minnesota.  I learned so much from both of them along the way – not only from the things they said, but also from how they lived their lives.  They felt the struggles of ordinary Minnesotans so profoundly and sincerely that they literally couldn’t help but fight for them with every ounce of their beings.  Anyone who traveled with them, especially on those long drives somewhere in greater Minnesota, late at night, can recount the impossibility of getting either of them to rest when they were fired up about some story they had heard.  I can still hear Paul’s voice so distinctly:  “We gotta DO something about that!”

I feel those words every time I meet or hear a story of someone struggling or someone who feels they are without a voice in the systems affecting their lives.  I can’t turn away.  I know Paul and Sheila wouldn’t have.  They would have found a way to DO something about it.

There was no better testament to the power of their irrepressible conviction to fight for the underdogs than the memorial wall that sprang up after their plane went down on that terrible October day ten years ago.  After I heard the news, I didn’t know what to do.  I felt like everything I believed in had been shattered into a million pieces.  I remember just driving aimlessly for hours and sobbing uncontrollably…  and like so many people who had come to know and love Paul and Sheila, I eventually ended up down at the campaign office, just to be near to people who could understand the absolute heartbreak I was feeling.

And there it was – the most miraculous and moving collection of tributes – growing by the minute as each new visitor laid their offerings on the sidewalk or attached them to the chain link fence.  Disabled veterans, people suffering from mental illness, survivors of domestic violence – so many people who discovered their collective power and their shared voice because of Paul and Sheila Wellstone – they just kept coming, all night long, to pay their respects to the amazing couple who had fought so tirelessly for them.  As I stood there, an auto worker from the nearby Ford plant approached, silently unlaced his work boots, placed them gently on the sidewalk, and walked away.

It is an experience and an image I will never forget as long as I live, and it lives on inside me as a resonant, recurring question:

When my time comes, today or someday far from now, what will my own “memorial wall” hold?  For what will I have fought and with whom will I have stood?  I hope the answer will be “justice for the underdogs” just like it always was for Paul and Sheila.  May it be so for all of us who loved them so dearly, and who labor daily to keep their dreams alive.