Make it stand out.

Did Burt Bacharach say…?

(essay)

7/3/18

Did Burt Bacharach say what the world needs now is love?

Maybe so. Many feel love is a starting point for all that is good.

Sometimes there is so much anger and hate it is hard to find love, even for oneself.

For me, everything starts with curiosity. Easier to get hold of, easier to share. Less mushy and sentimental especially when neither others nor you trust yourself.

Etta James said - was it in Running and Hiding Blues? - that we do not have the right to be less than who we are. God demands that we fulfill our best destiny. We owe it to all our fellow men and women- all people. Even an atheist can get behind this.

My son points out that the reason primitive man needed many gods was that there was so much we did not understand. “Now,” he says “we need only one god because the only thing we really don’t understand is what came before the Big Bang.” I said “Frazer,” but he’s not old enough to have seen that show.

Scientists point out that our world does not need saving. People need saving. The earth or as one of my young students calls it in a myth he wrote, “Erf” will adjust to climate change. Species will die off. Biodiversity will reset itself to a different homeostasis.  We are presumptuous in thinking the Earth can not survive without humans.

My cousin, the futurist, says if computers take over, its only natural: an interesting offshoot of Darwinism: people evolved from a common ancestor with other mammals. People, needing a way to track commerce and improve construction envisioned mathematical systems in the Tigress-Euphrates Valley, in ancient China and Egypt. They all knew the Pythagorean Theorem long before Pythagoras codified it. Without it, the pyramids could not have been built... Leibniz and Newton developed or more rightly discovered the Calculus. Sewing machines used the first punch-cards, the nazis used IBM computers to track their mass genocide, our consumerist greed addicts us to technology... it’s as if Jonathan Swift who imagined a society where people in order to be communicated with had to be hit over the head, jumped a couple of hundred years into the future and designed cell phones as a bad joke. Steve Martin has a scene in “LA Stories” where a couple is dining in a restaurant: The guy is on his phone non-stop while his wife at first patiently waits... eventually she picks up her cell. She dials. He picks up. She says, “Hi honey. I’m leaving you.”

 What is it about the first radios which captures our attention even to this day? Was it the leap into the unknown? Was it our first venture toward becoming un-tethered?

What would the world, the physical planet, lose by our hiding and minimizing ourselves into small, non-threatening-go along with the flow automatons? The answer is nothing. Society, the human race, and individual people however would be shortchanged immeasurably.

So what keeps us in fear?

We are all bullied to some extent. Perhaps we also all bully others despite our better instincts, because we have not learned to accept ourselves fully and work on ourselves in truly meaningful and helpful ways- too blinded by envy, greed and— pick your own vice.

We have all suffered at least minor traumas. Those who are resilient- like the god in an ancient Bushman creation myth who keeps getting killed only to become bigger and stronger each time and who has the humility to learn from his son- can make a positive impact.

Shostakovich was used by the Soviet state machine: productivity/ soviet socialist dehumanizing factories, dehumanizing work and living conditions, unimaginable suffering. Yet great love kept him alive, sometimes barely.

He was used, when it so pleased them. The rest of the time they made his life a misery. He was a pawn in their propaganda machine as Jews who at concentration camps performed symphonies and then after the Red Cross and the news media devoured the propaganda, the Jews were killed, their usefulness having expired... And we too, our great nation of freedom and opportunity, at our southern border putting kids in cages... Our all-powerful leader “can at least count on the support of Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who defended the policy on her show Monday night, saying that the centers “are essentially summer camps.” More recently she said in response to mass murders, that the issue of guns was a hoax, like the election of dumpf. Parse that anyway you want.

The West is no more virtuous than the east, the south or the north. When British soldiers returned from the unspeakable horrors of World War I, rather than honoring and caring for the traumatized veterans, that great government, which was in fact great in many ways, because they could not afford -so they thought- the expense of caring for their heroes, decreed that there was no such thing as shell shock- that the only reason some men were destroyed by war was they were not good enough soldiers. They treated their heroes like so many machines. Machines were used by nazis. Their inhuman machine destroyed those they viewed as weak. Stephen Hawkins would not have been allowed to give his gifts to humanity. He would have been devoured by the maws of that terrible machine.

Mandy Gonzalez says, fear, acknowledge it... and do it anyway.

Gonzalez, did she conquer fear more than Shostakovich?

Had they met, it would have been a strange encounter of the second kind.

This essay was inspired, by my friend and career coach, Jeff Neil. His validation of whatever I may have to offer others is a priceless a gift to me and a reminder of how I would live if I were not afraid of being seen.