Thursday August 17, 2023; 10:46 AM EDT
- I have a hunch now why the Pete Seeger quotation from 1981 really surprised me. I saw him in concert somewhere around that time, with Arlo Guthrie and a small band. This was the Mississippi River Festival, not far from St. Louis on the Illinois side, on one of the Illinois public university campuses with a large curving slope of lawn and a stage at the bottom, nice acoustics and room for hundreds of blankets full of fans. They sang all the songs you might guess they'd sing, and Seeger insisted on making it a sing-a-long. A third of the way into the first famous song, when the singing was sporadic out in the audience, he just stopped and said, roughly, "The acoustics must be terrible here. I can hardly hear you."#
- Some of the songs were about particular episodes of activism, but these were often decades into the past, and other songs were all-purpose anthems. This land was, after all, our land, and one of these days maybe we ill overcome. And you could feel the spirit rising as the concert progressed.#
- But now, fresh from the surprise of that 1981 quotation, of hearing Seeger urge people to begin their activism in their home place, my memories of the concert's songs, the concert's sense of activism, was that we were inadvertently being urged to think in the biggest terms, not to think locally at all. Yes, we could join the next march on Washington, if somebody would organize one. We could get into the spirit of that. But the thousands of us on the lawn were not organized together for any particular local thing. We didn't know how to affiliate with each other, and the music had us thinking of the long-ago past or of the big-scale nation and world. The songs taught little about organizing and affiliating in the present. The songs might move us to desire something like that, but I can't recall my thoughts turning to the local that evening.#
- But the 1981 Seeger interview says there's no hope if there's no powerful local organizing, no matter the issue. That sounds right to me, and points in the direction of hope. At the end of the concert, we all filed out of the venue into our cars, and headed down the various roads and highways back to our private lives, with no clear sense of a "What's next?" We weren't organized or affiliated when we arrived, and we weren't when we left. No toolkit forming up in our heads, no alliances strengthening, no paths of communication newly buzzing. Those are all very concrete and specific steps. #
- No wonder the 1981 quotation surprised me in 2023. In the fuzziness of memory, I had no idea that Pete Seeger understood about local politics because the music had soared over the crowd beautifully and movingly and ethereally and then vanished. Of course he understood -- any episode in the civil rights movement or the labor movement teaches it. But without affiliation, without structures for working together one way or another in place, all you have are disembodied voices floating away on the summer breeze. All you have is pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-attending entertainment.#