One Million and Ten

I get home delivery of The New York Times. Sunday, May 15th, the "front page" was two pages, front and back, with a map of the US, showing where the 1,000,000 people who had died of COVID in US had lived. In the same paper were the first reports of the massacre in Buffalo, in which 13 people were shot and 10 killed by a white supremacist teenager. The subtext of the news was that the mass abandonment of the marginalized, poor and people of color is escalating in our country.

Sunday afternoon I joined friends and neighbors at the Music City Festival. The Festival partners with restaurants in Orange, NJ, so Sunday's event took place at a park in my neighborhood opposite Hat City Kitchen. The crowd of young black and brown artists sparkled with genius, like the sun glinting off diamonds. It is a true thing that specific places can nurture specific geniuses, and Orange is such a place for musicians. 

I suddenly felt the dissonance between the implications of the news and the evidence of my own eyes. It made me dizzy. I asked one of the organizers if we might pause to memorialize our losses.  As the echoes of the steel drum faded, I asked people to stand for a moment of silence. One young woman looked at me quizzically for a second. When she understood what I was saying, she shifted gears swiftly, from the languor of the listening to music on a sunny afternoon in the park to the intense energy of youth dedicated to the cause of our survival. She stood tall.  We all stood. 

There was no music in that moment, yet there was lots of music standing there with us. We Shall Overcome was there, and so was We Are Climbing Jacob's Ladder, War (what is it good for), and Give Us Bread and Give Us Roses. And every song that the artists performing there that day had shared with us. We stood in the music, embodying the sure knowledge: Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.