A Spin Off of Keep a Word/Drop a Word and Music, Pics, and Whatnot

SnapDragon NY · Jun 9, 2022

Jimi said:
worlds apart

Never Tear Us Apart- INXS

Bliss Doubt · Jun 9, 2022

Jimi said:

I'm not playing the game with this post. I'm replying on the loss of Jim Seals. I'll have another one after this, to get back in queue.

Seals & Crofts had a unique sound.

I thought of these great lyrics after the Waukesha massacre last Thanksgiving week, one black man using his vehicle to mow down the celebrants in a holiday parade, killing people, including children, an atrocity. But to me it was not a surprise. It wasn't fair. It was a horrible nightmare. How can we ever again come together to revel in the streets, to celebrate the seasons and our joy?

So these great Seals and Crofts lyrics came to mind. This is one of the most beautiful songs in the great global song book. Apparently it was used in a cheezy B-grade movie, which is too bad. It wasn't written for that movie. Producers only have to pay the royalties to use a song.

Justice is a lady
Lay me down with justice in a long white gown
With a breath of love, we can share
Sleep with me if you dare
Celebrate my fair share

Fair is a changing word
But fair is an honored promise
Justice, if you're still there
I will have my fair share

The writer of those lyrics knew it is risky to passively expect Lady Justice to take care of inequities and unfairness in this world. She wears her blindfold, which symbolizes justice without regard for who will be hurt as it plays out in future scenarios. She holds her long sword which is lethal when wielded by a blindfolded person or by a skilled sighted user of it.

I risk getting political if I say the BLM movement is not an organic black movement from the grass roots, and I still believe that. I have been deeply involved in real minority peace and justice movements in my past, an experience I treasure because it changed me. I know how most black people want peace and progress for themselves, and especially for their children, with an awareness that we have a long way to go, a long battle that is difficult to wage in peace and without fear. However, the BLM movement continues to attract extremists, just as in Europe the governments are trying to pit Muslims against Christians and Jews.

So when I heard of the Waukesha massacre, a single memory surfaced in my mind. When I was a child, I listened to some of my Alabama relatives (my dad was from there) laughing about how the police had used electric cattle prods to subdue black protesters in the civil rights era. I later learned of how, in the early era after the civil war, black people were hated and lynched by whites, especially in the south (but by no means only in the south). A favored treatment was to tie a black man to a car and drag him on the street, torturing him unto death. We can go back further into the atrocities of slavery, the selling of human beings to other humans, the separation of children from their parents, the rape of female slaves, all of it, into infinity, and there has been white slavery in the world too. But the early era of American black freedom, which was a bitter form of freedom, fraught with danger, hatred, prejudice, fear, that I believe is in the forefront of our national consciousness, what we all are working through now, and maybe what Lady Justice is blindly lashing out at with her deadly sword. Hangings, drownings, refusal of services, refusal of sales, separate entrances, separate water fountains, separate neighborhoods and schools, back of the bus. There was a book titled "The Negro Motorist Green Book" first published in 1936, sort of a Frommers equivalent for black travelers, listing what hotels would accommodate blacks, what restaurants would sell them food. 1936, sixty seven years after abolition, and the book had many subsequent updated releases.

Justice is sometimes subconscious, other times unconscious. Like many powerful icons, Lady Justice lives within all of us, foments within us, warns us to, at all times, pray for peace, practice kindness, make each other our kings and our queens. Blindfolded, she looks within. Her lethal sword rests in her hand, pointing downward, until...