With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row
And your magazine-husband who one day just had to go
And your gentleness now, which you just can’t help but show
Who among them do you think would employ you?
2014 is no worse or better than 1966, when that song was written. Indeed, issues from those times, for which Baez and Dylan wrote memorable anthems, persist. Consider race.
In the ’60s, when they sang, cities burned, in part because of social ills traced by the Kerner Commission to “two societies, one white, one black— separate and unequal.”
Recently, businesses in Ferguson, Mo., burned after a grand jury returned no indictment for a white officer who took 12 shots at a black teenager, killing him. Protests of the grand jury decision erupted nationally, including as close to Arlington as
down Mass. Ave. in Harvard Square.
Do not the echoes of this finding resound here? Will some Arlington residents, as they have done for more than a quarter century, recall the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in January?
Yes, some will, but is that enough?
Will it cause us to look within to see the civil war that continues in America, even in liberal Arlington?
Yes, some will be introspective, but is that enough? Will all do so with unprejudiced eyes admit to their own perceptions?
And what of those who fear to look?
As it is, who recalls last January’s King remembrance? You should.
Here’s a clue: ” … none has moved me more than the words of Peniel E. Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University.
Joseph spoke for 30 minutes on Monday, Jan. 20, at Town Hall without notes and seemingly without taking a single breath. The audience was awestruck.”
Awestruck about what?
“It broke into applause spontaneously — not because he offered sound bites or the usual platitudes about the civil-rights leader, but because he did the opposite.
“He asked us to recast the image of King from that of a visionary, a prophet and a healer to that of a revolutionary and a harsh critique of American society.
“Joseph characterized the civil rights leader as a ‘peaceful warrior.’ He reminded us that during the last few years of his life, King used ‘revolutionary tactics’ of agitation and demonstration to
denounced American militarism and capitalism.”
A race-related chord Joseph struck, one that members of local churches have sounded this year, is the disproportionate number of people of color who populate prisons.
We cannot lock away that civil war — our prejudices based on skin color — in a cell.
As Baez sang in “Prison Trilogy”:
Luna was a Mexican the law called an alien
For coming across the border with a baby and a wife
Though the clothes upon his back were wet
Still he thought that he could get
Some money and things to start a life
It hadn’t been too very long when it seemed like everything went wrong
They didn’t even have the time to find themselves a home
This foreigner, a brown-skin male
Thrown into a Texas jail
It left the wife and baby quite alone
He eased the pain inside him
With a needle in his arm
But the dope just crucified him
He died to no one’s great alarm
Come and lay, help us lay
Young Luna down
And we’re gonna raze, raze the prisons
To the ground
Wars, even civil ones, don’t have to continue. Look within and find the way to peace.
With Baez, sing “Gracias de la vida.”
P.S. A local note of hope lies in the retelling of the story of Henry Louis Gates and a Cambridge police sergeant in “A Pint of Understanding” by Arlington writer Lee Phenner. Find out about it here >>
This viewpoint was published Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2014. This column also appeared in print, in the Dec. 10 Advoacte.
