The State of the Community address by Mayor Larry Morrissey was a disappointment to those who applauded his fleeting moment of courage at the Board of Education on Tuesday, and who expected something more from him after many months of silence.  School Board member Bob Evans at a recent candidate’s forum called the conspicuous silence of Morrissey and the school board’s business handlers “a most cowardly act.”  Morrissey’s Thursday speech took an hour to deliver, with applause from an audience mostly comprised of Chamber of Commerce and Alignment Rockford fellows.

Morrissey hammers board

The last two school board meetings, drawing crowds of 400 to 500 vocal demonstrators, have been an embarrassment to the school board and its handlers. Morrissey hammered the school board on Tuesday and again on Thursday for its bungled unpacking of the despised closures. On Tuesday, while he chided the board for threatening to close the Montessori School where he is a parent, he declined to take a stand against ratification of the closing of six Westside campuses that effectively undoes two decades of desegregation efforts in Rockford.  Board president, David Kelly let out a show-stopping cry as the Mayor hit the two-minute mark, “Mr. Mayor, you have your house, and this is our house. Please stop!”  Some cheered, “Let him speak.”  To which the Mayor replied, “Thursday is my state of the community speech. And I’ll have more than two minutes.” I’ll be back, said the Mayo-nator. Thursday, Morrissey continued his contention with the board for its poor job of preparing the public for privatized education in Rockford.

While maintaining a public distance, Sheffield and Morrissey have been dance partners in privatization since the beginning.  Mayor Morrissey is among the original champions of the Alignment Rockford and the Rockford Charter Initiative organizations. He welcomed Dr LaVonne Sheffield in 2009 when she presented her Broad agenda and methodology. (1) The greeters included privatization advocate extraordinaire Paul Vallas who recommended Sheffield, based on their work together implementing charters in the East Baton Rouge Recovery District.  EBR is the most charter soaked district in America.

The first paragraph of Alignment Rockford’s (AR) webpage, (2) states that the organization exists to “facilitate the coordinated alignment of community resources with the strategic plan for district 205 of Dr Lavonne Sheffield.” An identical clip art pic of smiling students on a school bus also smiles from a Gates Foundation webpage. AR emulates the model of Alignment Nashville, Tennessee except that Rockford’s version has a far higher proportion of district 205 administrators on its board of directors. Neither organization seems to invite many teachers along on the journey.  It will be interesting to see how Carpenter’s Local head Brad Long reconciles his participation in AR with the union busting going on at 205.  Among the School Board candidates, Tim Rollins sits as AR Operations Chair.  This fact appears only on his printed material and is either not mentioned or has been removed from his website. (3) Curiously, Rollins told an audience at the first candidate’s forum he was “undecided, but open to charters.” Tennessee, AR’s model is a right to work state, where education reformers are even now completing legislation to end collective bargaining rights for teachers. Every school will set its own scale of compensation for teachers. It will also become illegal for bargaining units to approach Boards of Education. (4)

Rumors and fear abound in Rockford

PTO parents voiced suspicion that the Kennedy / Montessori campus is being cleared as a charter complex for the Gifted Program.  Whispers to Gifted parents that their program is protected did not help to dispel rumors. Barely a month ago prominent community leaders denied any charter motive, now a national spokesperson for privatization rushes to defend Rockford’s repurposing.  A Rock River Times article, Charters 101, drew an indignant rebuttal from the head of the Illinois Charter Network Association. The aptly named author, Jim Publicover, is a well educated spin agent whose previous job was with Trone Inc. (5) There his mission was using social media to bring brands to the public and the public to brands, a curiously Rovian construct when applied to democracy and public education. According to his resume, he has no experience or training as an educator. In practice, charters are a mixed bag: 17% do better, 35 % do worse, and 48% do the same as the public schools they replaced. Rockford’s Galapagos Charter franchise is still within the grace period.  Chicago’s massive effort, Renaissance 2010 yielded fair to poor results. (6)

During these months of confusion and worry for parents, children, teachers and others Morrissey has been notoriously silent.  With Morrissey finally adding his voice to those of the outraged parents of children at Maria Montessori School, that program (and others) received a temporary stay of execution on Tuesday, but we should well remember the recent words of the district’s $1000 per day consultant, Shannon Bingham “What is not successfully cut this year, will be cut next year, the year after, and so on… people in Rockford are suffering from attachment to specialty programs that Rockford cannot afford.”

Sheffield’s model and Seattle’s lesson

Superintendent Sheffield vehemently asserts that she does not support charters, and although Morrissey blew her public cover, in actuality she does not need to.  As soon as she completes the crashing of our district and performs the requisite amputations, local vulture capitalists stand ready to rent and sell us the therapy and prosthetics of privatization.  Sheffield, according to the Broad playbook is herewith expendable, like her counterpart in Seattle, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, thrown out last week along with her CFO after three years on the job.  The list of grievances sung by person after person in Seattle at the fateful board meeting mirror our own concerns:

Gone.  For fostering an air of secrecy and intimidation, leading to retribution against teachers and those in the administration who sought to report wrongdoing.

Gone.  For manufacturing a crisis and enacting massive school closings in lower income neighborhoods, including closing the Seattle African Studies Magnet.

Gone.  For ignoring the chorus of voices imploring her to work with and not against the community.

Gone.  For bringing cronies, consultants and carpetbaggers to serve her Broad agenda, including a $750, 000 grant from Bill Gates’ Foundation aimed at discrediting the teachers union during negotiation time. (7)

Gone. For pressing for larger classrooms, new curricula, testing and assessment that served the privatization reformers more than the children.

After a no confidence vote by Seattle teachers and a forensic audit by the state, Goodloe-Johnson was ultimately fired along with her CFO, Don Kennedy, for failing to stop the siphoning off of $1.8 million in funds to a crony phony non-profit that masqueraded as a minority assistance education program.  The board members offered personal and public apologies to the taxpayers of the community.  All this damage took place in three short years.   It will cost Seattle Public Schools a year’s salary of $300,000 to get rid of Goodloe-Johnson. Sheffield’s salary package in Rockford exceeds that of Goodloe-Johnson. (8)

If we understand that Sheffield is expendable, a possibility members of the alignment are discretely beginning to voice, the issue for Rockford is: What will remain after Sheffield? According to bestselling author Diane Ravitch, speaking last week in Madison with supporters of school board candidate Jane Hayes, “Across America, Broad superintendents are falling like autumn leaves.” The Broad Foundation has dropped Goodloe-Johnson from their list of fellows.  Sheffield is still available for speaking engagements nationally.  We have a board election in April.

Morrissey unpacks re election platform

Morrissey, on Thursday suggested that with HB 1886, we can abolish the entire system of elected school boards in favor of appointments and that with Representative Dave Winters’ HB 1673, we can limit remedies for public workers  who seek promised compensation and benefits. (9) A February 2011 directive from the conservative Fordham Foundation instructs policy makers to go straight to the end goals, without pausing for compromise in privatizing education and breaking unions. (10) The Gates Foundation has spent more than $4 billion across the U.S. to break up large school districts, proliferate charter schools, and advance teacher evaluation linked to standardized test scores. Despite the efforts of Sheffield, Morrissey and others to paint Rockford as desperate and deserving, here in Obama’s backyard, we did not receive coveted Race to the Top bail out funds.  Sheffield has blamed us for her pumped up-trumped up deficit. Morrissey bet on charters.

Finally, in a bow towards Wisconsin’s Governor Walker, Morrissey made his own stab at collective bargaining for public sector workers. Thereby, Mayor Morrissey set his re election platform and endorsed the layoff last week of more than 500 teachers and district 205 staff.  Sheffield has threatened to carve higher into the workforce if concessions are not granted by the teacher’s union.  Can the chaos our community is experiencing be the fulfillment of an elaborately choreographed dance leading to the outrageous and undemocratic destination proposed by our mayor? Is this being planned behind closed doors with support and collusion by elected legislators, business leaders, and our own School Board?   Mayor Morrissey, what have you done? With a rebel yell they cried “Morr, Morr, Morr.”  Sheffield will net nearly $1 million in salary and benefits for her time in the river city. Who will pick up the pieces?  We will. (11)

David Stocker is an artist, teacher and song writer living in Rockford for 23 years. He has created the DISTRICT 205 IS ON FIRE SONGBOOK for activists.

Footnotes/sources:

1. http://www.rockford.edu/news/25091/Rockford-College-in-the-News-Rockford-superintendent-search-recap-Mayo.htm

2. http://www.alignmentrockford.com

3. http://rollins4rockford.com/

4. http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jan/29/bills-in-legislature-have-teachers-furious/

5. http://www.trone.com

6. http://millermps.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/chicago-school-reform-plan-launched-during-duncan%E2%80%99s-tenure-fails-%E2%80%9Cto-make-the-grade%E2%80%9D/

7. http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2010/09/02/seattle-reaches-contract-agreement-with-teachers-union-but-support-slim-for-superintendent

8. https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/03/03/the-superintendents-send-off/

9. http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/BillStatus.asp?DocNum=1673&GAID=11&DocTypeID=HB&LegId=58835&SessionID=84&GA=97

10. http://www.edexcellencemedia.net/publications/2011/20110106_STSD_PolicyBrief/20110106_STSD_PolicyBrief.pdf)

11. Dennis Kucinich speaks in Madison 3/12/11

<30>                                                                        3/11/11

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. Every time I see another photo of a dead child, dead by our bombs…every sad twisted story of our army… another army gone wrong…I think: Today, there will be even more people who hate us in the world. I want all those people in Palestine and Iraq and everywhere to know that I don’t like what you are doing. It is near impossible to trust you and most of your associates in government. Your vision is not one of democracy. It is not even one of fairness or kindness. Our ancestors are dishonored. Our children’s lives will be burdened with repairing this mess.

We would all be better off if you had sought treatment, had never run for office, had not thought yourself good enough, had not seized power, nor assembled your greedy team and ordered all this killing. How will you take responsibility for all the hatred and sorrow you have brought into the world? Other dictators are being brought to justice, who stole elections, who persecuted, who ordered massacres, who let children be murdered, who lined their friends’ pockets with the people’s gold, who lied and misused the terrible power of armies. You too will face judgement.

You want us to believe your vision is still good. It is rotten. The money wasted in warfare will never be spent on education, healthcare, and environmental reforms needed to sustain and improve human life on this planet. The victims of global weather catastrophies struggle, the meaning of 9/11 is ignored, children are bombed, the rest of the world begs us to stop… meanwhile, your friends at Halliburton, Raytheon, KBR, Bechtel and Carlyle line up again and again to suck the marrow from our nation’s bones. I can see that we have become the real evil-doers. We build the bombs, we blow it up, we rebuild it, we build more bombs, we blow it up again…endlessly, shamelessly, repeating. AND at every turn of the wheel, the American people must pay these friends of yours.

So may your friends also stand and face judgment in this horror.

Rice: oil tycoon, co-owner of Exxon, wealthier with every gas increase.

Cheney: greedy energy cost manipulator, war profiteer like no other in history.

Rumsfeld: avoided military service, arms trader, Saddam’s old friend, lied to start war.

Gonzales: author of the writs of torture, presiding over mass deportations

Wolfowitz: architect of the war, destroyer of world economics. et al…

Do not wave the Holy Bible in our face any more. Decent people are offended by your smug smile, by your jokes, your media cheer leaders and your apologists. We feel sorry for you. Watching you on live TV, it is painful to see your thoughts jam and hear your words falter and…a pause… You search for the most appealing yet insubstantial words to say, to a soldier without legs, to the homeless of New Orleans, to elders, to America’s urban poor. In another part of your mind you are busy dropping bombs, cutting taxes for the rich, denying benefits, slashing pensions, and choking education. Your liar’s pathology will not let you be so glib about what you are up to. Your mind is also seeing the images of poverty, death and destruction. In those searching seconds of silence, decent people all over this planet see the distance between good and evil in your soul, as the leader of the free world unmasks a terrible insanity.

And as the proportion of dispossessed, widowed and wounded grows in our land, you are your own undoing. Only 28% of our nation is still in the denial that allows them to support you. The other 72% are people of different economic backgrounds, ages, colors, and spiritualities. Yet we form a group of likeminded people. You see, we believe that it is not human to turn away from other people’s suffering, not human to ruin the air and the water for corporate profits, not human to preside over the destruction of innocent peoples’ lives and livelihoods here or in other lands. We feel there is something wrong with the accumulation of private wealth that exceeds the GDP of some nations. We think the dream of America has been hijacked as surely as planes on 9/11. Daily we pray together as one. We pray for our deliverance from vicious extremists like you.

I wish the war were over. I wish you would stop it. You could, you know. You could have an amazing epiphany, like John Newton the slave trader, and you could turn this ship around! It would be the single most momentous event in the history of humankind.

Are you there? Hello…?

David Stocker
Is a musician in Illinois
dijeridoo [at] aol.com

What’s the difference between what is happened in Alabama and what is going on in Arabia at the hands of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney?

Answer 1: The young men in Alabama, when caught, have admitted wrongdoing.

Answer 2: The young men in Alabama did not rig their acceptance to the college where they met.

Answer 3: Nor were they abetted in their act by the US Congress.

Answer 4: They did not profit financially from investing in the gas to start the fires.

Answer 5: Nor the construction contracts to rebuild the burned churches.

Answer 6: They were not draft dodgers, nor AWOL from the National Guard at any time.

Answer 7: They didn’t use anybody else to enact their violence and stupidity. Nobody died.

Answer 8: The spree in Alabama lasted only a few months.

David Stocker is a teacher and writer in the Midwest.

We are told by the Bush Administration that this deal was checked out thoroughly and that it would be wrong to discredit an Arab buyer, Dubai Ports World (DPW). Thus, we are exhorted by the same government that has brought us jihad in a half dozen Arab lands to believe that if we disapprove of this multibillion dollar contract, we are being unfair to the good Arab folks. Whenever the words “multibillion dollar deal” and “the Bush Administration” occur in the same paragraph, good folks everywhere should pay close attention.

By all reports, Dubai, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is a rowdy seaport. Liken it to the picture of Casablanca in the famous movie of the same name. There is little regulation and no taxes!!! The usual suspects include, drug traffickers, arms dealers, smugglers, people wanting to move illegal goods globally without taxation, while blurring the lines of accountability. From say nuclear weapons, to restricted technology, to human cargo, lets just say, the biggest players in the world go here, not Vegas. According to Webster, an “emirate” is the jurisdiction of a direct descendant of Mohammed. This is an Arabian land run by chieftains, perhaps more bound by wealth than by Islamic fealty. DPW, is state owned, meaning it is the playground of the governing chieftains. Newsweek (March 14, 2005, Fareed Zakaria) characterized U.A.E. as among the most repressive governments in the Middle East and at the opposite end of the human rights scale to Israel (as long as you’re not Palestinian). This is all in contrast to the spin the Bush people now want to create about U.A.E.

The gatekeeper to the seaport deal is John Snow, Secretary of the US Treasury, who replaced Paul O’Neill. Remember, O’Neill was fired because he refused to give in to pressure from the Bush people to support the invasion of Iraq.
Until he was tapped to serve our government, John Snow was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of CSX Corporation, “where he successfully guided the transportation company though a period of tremendous change.” CSX is the massive railroad monopoly that controls almost all cargo movements across America from the seaports. Snow’s knowledge of international industry “stems from his tenure as Chairman of the Business Roundtable, the foremost business policy group comprised of 250 chief executive officers of the nation’s largest companies.” This group advises the Administration on business policy.

Prior to answering the call to serve in government, CSX Corporation under Snow, paid no federal income tax at all, “supplementing its over $1 billion in pretax profits over the four year period with $164 million in tax rebate checks from the federal government”. During the same period, CSX joined the list of 100 top political campaign contributing corporations, (70% to Republicans) “gave Snow $36 million in salary, bonuses, stock and options, and forgave a $24 million loan so he would not lose money along with other shareholders as the company’s stock price declined.” (via Citizens for Tax Justice, dKosopedia)

Not trumpeted on the government’s website is the fact that Snow is now the head of a little known government committee that privately approves foreign business transactions. When CSX, was bought out one year ago this week by Dubai Ports World for $1.4 billion, Snow cashed in on his stock options. DPW, the very same U.A.E. state owned company that is now with help from Snow, closing the loop for packages moving from the slums of Dubai to your own home.
My point is this, with a nuclear bomb the size of a laptop we are already unsafe. If somebody wanted that to happen, it would. The extreme efforts and enormous expense to protect our homeland have proven utterly ineffective. This DPW deal under a microscope is yet another example of the theft of our government by a small cadre of wealthy people with a very narrow agenda. It is an effort by Bush to pay back his Arab handlers while he still can. This should put the light to their faux democracy-mongering throughout the world. It should lay open the huge homeland security budget as largely a sham and history’s greatest boon to cronyism, with the sole intent of distracting Americans from seeing that the policies and actions of our own government are the greatest danger to the safety of the people of the world today.

The Sultans of spin in the White House and the Emirates of Arabia should read the words of Mohammed. “Be charitable. Allah tolerates trade, but loveth not usury. Guard against the time when you shall be brought before your sins. Be saved from avarice.” (Holy Qu’ran 000.276-280, 059.009)

For many reasons and on many levels, Bush’s February 24 statement to the national press, rings true. “This deal would not go forward if we were concerned about the safety of America.” They are not.

David Stocker, is a writer, musician and teacher in the Midwest. He is part of a musical tribe called One Drum.

This article was also published on Counterpunch on February 25, 2006.

Many Muslims who hold moderate religious views and many people who are not Muslim, are offended by the infamous Danish cartoons. I’ve not seen the drawings, I don’t feel like I have to. Nor do I need to see photos from Abu Graib, Fallujah or Baghdad. I can see the cartoons and the other more graphic images reflected in the eyes of people who believe this war is somehow okay, who believe the lie that America is the exporter of freedom to the world and that we have some high ground on how it works.

To reduce this event to an issue of freedom of speech is to see it out of context with the world today. The debate is healthy sure, but it is a mistake to confuse the debate with the acts that provoked it. And since the coalition of the willing (which still includes the US, UK, Denmark and a couple guys from Togo) are presently trying to subjugate and intimidate at least three predominantly Muslim countries, we can hardly expect the Muslim world to appreciate how free speech should include insulting and degrading their godhead, their women, their beliefs and customs. Americas racist misadventure in the Mideast has provided excellent cover to nations wanting to fine tune their xenophobic machinery and religious intolerance. We should be very concerned at the rise of violence against and despair among innocent Muslim people in western Europe.

Up to last week the cartoons were just another example of baiting brown folks on the playground. It all seemed like good fun. Then things suddenly heated up when Muslims worldwide stopped buying goods from Danish businesses that depend on Islamic market share. Like we should be so concerned about what’s happening to Lego’s quarterly revenues because of those bad Muslims, that we forget about the economic infrastructure that has been destroyed in Iraq and Afghanistan and replaced by Halliburton. It seems ironic to me that the side with all the power here, made up of white European provocateurs begins to whine when united Muslims begin to wield their collective economic power. Economic jihad is something capitalists should understand and even show a little respect for. Maybe we could learn what we need to know without planes slamming into office buildings.

The cartoons should be seen as the hate crime they are, like a breach in global security. But making the cartoonists or publishers liable somehow for the havoc and distress caused by the cartoons would mean we would also have to make our leaders criminally accountable for the mayhem of this war. Failing to make our leaders accountable, we and our children’s children, will all bear the consequences.

As far as history is concerned, ours is a relatively young model that represents one kind of “democratic and free” society. People from the rest of the world don’t think we in America look so free as we did just a decade ago. Most Americans even agree that we have kind of let the empire’s destiny get hijacked by a small cadre of hateful people with a frighteningly narrow agenda. With Bush embodying our peculiar mix of god, the corporation and war, and the rest of us steaming right along with him towards Armageddon, it looks rather like the trial period for our model is up.

As an advocate of free speech, I would not want my views to create much elbow room for Nazis, racists, fundamentalists, neo cons, jihadis, etc. They seem to find all the room they need these days without my help. Personally, I’d find it hard to have much faith in a god without a sense of humor. I guess that might decrease the chances of Islam, Judaism AND Christianity as global keepers. Please let the next guys know that I’m good with the concept of trying with all my might to do least harm.

David Stocker is a Unitarian Universalist, a writer, teacher and musician in Rockford, Illinois. He is part of the medicine band, One Drum.

The most disturbing thing about the disaster in New Orleans after the reality, is its translatability. Suddenly we are all one with the dispossessed of Fallujah, the drowning in Baghdad, and the homeless in Afghanistan. While we can fragment our own national distress, isolate the looters of darkness from the enlightened who are helping themselves survive in that watery hell that was New Orleans, we cannot help but feel that we are all living two feet below sea level with underfunded levees.

Of course, the outcome of the reality should be the downfall of the worst government in the history of America, maybe in the entire history of democratic republics. Of course, Bush, Rove, Rumsfeld and Rice should be tried as war criminals, penalized of all present and future wealth and sentenced to clean lavatories in a Chinese workcamp. Add to that culpable crowd, the Big Money oil gas gougers, corporate xenomorphs and insurance tightwads. All these systems were in place long ago to ensure the upward flow of money to a few and downward flow of ignorance and desperation to the rest. That all made it worse when Katrina came in off the Gulf.

Doesn’t it make you a little mad to know just how much damage could be done to an entire American city by just diverting a few million from a levee project into the war effort, and how many people are dying for want of the use of a few dozen helicopters presently busy strafing women and children in Iraq. Our National Guard in the Middle East get to watch CNN footage of their own families wading through flood waters and see photos of their own homes destroyed. This didn’t have to happen this way.

Do we now see our media for what it is? Helping us get tough to make it through the opportunistic gas price hikes, focusing on the loss of casinos before the plight of those too poor to drive their SUVs out of the flood. Flag waving us off to Iraq, while our own nation lost its soul because red white and blue sells better than black.

Do we now see who our president truly is? A narcissistic, petulant, greedy and dangerous fool who hid from national service, drenched himself in drugs and alcohol, failed time and again in business, found his personal savior and then found the backing to rise to the role of chief marionette with an agenda of gutting the last remaining superpower on earth.

Are we so proud? Our Lady Liberty now says, “Watch out or we’ll make you wretched, poor and yearning to breathe free.” From a place that stood for democracy and freedom comes the tiny and unsubstantiated whimper that “help is on the way to the good folks of” The sound of Bush’s voice makes me feel sick. How might we react differently to 9/11 if humility and real democracy were anywhere in sight? This government has placed hundreds of millions of people at unfathomable risk: Americans and Iraqis alike, Afghans and Israelis, residents of New Orleans, Najaf, Nairobi and Naperville. Meanwhile from the same events, elected individuals within this government have secured personal fortunes of an astronomical scale.

In economics there is the concept of opportunity cost. That could be likened to what Robert Frost called the “road not taken” The story of New Orleans just might have gone differently if officials there had managed to be heard and if even another $20 million had been put into the levees. For a window on the Bush legacy, multiply the story of New Orleans as many times as you can up to the $150 billion cost of this war. How many peoples’ lives could have been changed for good if this money had been spent loving life. Can we stop it now?

Shame on President Bush, shame on a Congress duped into war, bought and paid for by special interests, shame on industry whose global warming (just a theory, like evolution. Right?)..aims to make this planet uninhabitable.

What would it take for you? Maybe a catastrophic or even a minor health issue, maybe just a few weeks of lay-off, maybe a car accident or even a dead battery. Maybe a stock failure, a marriage failure, maybe a gas price hike, maybe a school closing, a base closing, a factory closing. Maybe the loss of a sector, a city or a soul.

We are all two feet below sea level, levee broke and water rising.
So how good is your levee? Mine sucks.

David Stocker is a freelance writer, State of Illinois Artist in Residence and co-creator of One Drum, a medicine band.

So where is that powerful healing force right now? Not that the sixties are going to blow in and save us like a mighty wind. No, we need something for today. With a few notable exceptions like Ani di Franco and Ben Harper, the so called ‘new folk’ movement is about as political as Britney Spears. The corporatization of popular music is a death knell for the oral tradition just as electronic voting machines spell the death for democratic elections. Corporate music has obscured the real legacy of Woody Guthrie with issues of royalties and licensing. The man believed music was not to be owned but to be given away. There’s very little of the significance of a quarter million years of human oral history to be found shrink-wrapped at Border’s Books and Music.

Connecting the dots of my musical journey, you’d find me picking up glimpses of oral history in the sacred music at Pine Ridge Reservation, Pilgrim Baptist Church and Philly Folk Fest. It’s been said that the only truly unique American contribution to musical history is the Elvis Presley movie. I always liked the moment in Elvis’ movies when life just spontaneously bursts into pop music. Lately I’m beginning to think that other than maybe the thrum of a Harley Davidson, the only unique contribution America has made to the history of sound is the sound of two atomic bombs vaporizing tens of thousands of people. Most of the musical styles claimed as American music are derived from the music of people enslaved, conquered or otherwise oppressed.

So we better sing our little hearts out. For better or worse. If the ancestors are listening. Maybe a song we have not yet heard will come into our consciousness. Just maybe we can alter the tragic course of our American government.

The following new lyrics to a familiar Irish melody will be sung at a community meeting in Rockford, Illinois with Dennis Kucinich on March 13. Meeting with Dennis Kucinich feels a bit like attending at a hospice. But I am thankful for his courage and I want to tell him that. I’m proud that any political candidate had the balls to echo the 1950 ballad by Ed McCurdy
…last nite I had the strangest dream I never had before I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.

David Stocker is a teacher and member of One Drum