Music makes the people come together
Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel.
— Madonna
The article this month was to be about Live 8. I had nearly completed it — it wasn't bad. I didn't have a strong conclusion but the middle was good: scruffy rockers in cool shades unite the world with music. I then meditated on forms of worship and spirituality as those thoughts overwhelmed me during the concert.
I was moved by the concert, sharing a message with millions around the planet. How everybody else absorbed the message, I was going to argue, was as varied as the ways millions of worshippers absorb the Christian message each Sunday morning. Some take it to heart and act upon the Word, others merely pass the time out of habit and guilt. It really doesn't matter, what matters is millions share in the process.
But, that was that article. Less than a week from the concert, bombs exploded in London and that sense of unity disappeared. The world once more seemed broken and separated. The cracks in our human foundations were obvious. The concert seemed only a pathetic diversion from reality.
The world has changed since 9/11, as it is commonly called. Or, more accurately, our North American world view has changed since that fateful Tuesday morning. Over 3,000 people over three decades have been murdered in terrorist attacks in England alone. Bombings have been commonplace across Europe for decades.
But, those were political actions — the terrorizers hated the government for its policies. What Bob Geldof did with LiveAid and Live 8, Beider Meinhoff, IRA and others did with live grenades: petition world leaders to change their point of view. The little taste we had of that in Canada, the October Crisis, seems quaint today. The issues the FLQ wanted to highlight quickly gave way to civil liberty arguments arising from the War Measures Act.
But the terrorists today — these aren't well scrubbed middle-class kids angry at their daddy's world. They are, it seems, hell-bent on hating us. They are the other.
Who is the other?
But, the London bombers, it seems, were not the other. They were English born and bred — pigmented English, mind you, but born in the bosom of the isle. But, something failed them, failed the whole country in fact, and they became the other. They became the isolated fanatic with bombs in backpacks riding public transportation. Something seared their brain and they began to see their birthplace as their enemy.
Who is the other?
The left argues our cultural and political sins give birth to terrorism. President George W. Bush claims the attackers hate democracy itself. Noam Chomsky claims President Bush abhors true democracy. The Christian Right believes core values are threatened (they believe that about everything). The Christian Left believes core values are threatened (these two groups have so much in common). Definitions wander, rhetoric soars and the other remains elusive.
The rhetoric — the professional pundits always at full speed — only adds to the cracks in our spiritual unity. It's a cacophony of specialized voices screaming their specialized interests. The left, the right, the secular, the religious, the fanatic, the agnostic, the fundamentalist Muslim or Christian or Jew, the righteous, the self-important, the commercial, the non-profit, the political, the non-governmental, the sincere, the hateful and the self-professed lover of humanity all add to that deafening white noise crowding our thoughts daily. They create the other; they are the balkanization of our society.
Perhaps, after all, this article is about Live 8. It might have been a false moment, it might have been a self-righteous moment, but it was one in which a brief unity was achieved. It used the good tools of our culture: popular music and television. It reached millions and was put together in a matter of weeks by the force of sheer will. That will — not just Geldof's or Bono's, but that of the thousands around the planet that made it happen so quickly — was born of a simple idea: Make Poverty History.
It erased the other. It shared humanity for a brief 12 hours. And it was fun.
