You Have to Sing
by Joyce Marcel is a free-lance journalist who lives in Vermont

So there it was again, my summertime conundrum. How do I reconcile the lush beauty of the countryside and my rewarding life with the mayhem my country causes in the world and the danger we all face, every day, as a result of it?

"Many of the kids coming back from Iraq are coming back blind," he (singer Steve Earle) told us. "Their body armor doesn't protect their faces. We're going to have a whole generation of blind kids." The balloons drifted gently above the tops of the trees as Earle launched into the chorus: "When will we ever learn/When will we ever see/We stand up and take our turn/And keep tellin' ourselves we're free." The balloons were gently swaying in the sky as Earle started talking about the death penalty. "A country that didn't have the death penalty wouldn't have attacked Iraq in the first place," he said.

I am abundantly aware that America is far from a classless society. It's a place where the rich are arrogantly rich, the middle class is running scared, and the poor are defiantly poor. As Earle reminds us, "Capitalism is perfectly fine as an economic system. Just not as a religion." For all of my country's wrongheadedness and injustices, however, most of us are leading relatively good lives. Food is abundant, we have cars and television sets and hair care products. We're not starving to death, or huddling in huts, afraid of the next rape or explosion. And we have music festivals where talented bands play beautiful, meaningful music while balloons rise up into the air like jewels and dangle off the clouds like earrings. How do we reconcile day lilies and terrorism, kindness and bombs, sunlight and tsunamis?

"Just because we're doing alright, we have to stay involved," he said. "Music changes everything, yes, but you will never stop a war by listening to music. You have to sing."

Full story here.