KAMALA HARRIS

Posted to Quakers in Gainesville August 2020

New York Times
Kamala and Maya with mother Shyamala Harris
Berkeley, California

Last fall a member of our meeting led a couple of Forums to enlighten us on the role that Adverse Childhood Experiences or ACE's play in a wide range of problems which we see in individuals and in society. Carol's education in Psychology and Public Health gives her unique perspective on understanding the sources of childhood difficulties. The Forum was spread over two sessions to demonstrate first how the developing brain is fixed into patterns of activities which determine how the child behaves at multiple levels. The second session was directed toward the interventions which alter the automatic reactions which are observed in the child.

The types of problems observed in children who have experienced adversity are as wide as are the conditions which children endure through neglect, abuse, poverty, illness, accidents, natural disasters and more.

Carol recommended that we read a book by Nadine Burke Harris, M.D. titled The Deepest Well. I found it a fascinating book with lots of technical information about how the brain develops and operates in conjunction with the body, and how she was able to organize a clinic in a low income neighborhood which provides a range of services to diagnose and treat the conditions resulting from ACEs. Dr. Burke Harris makes the book personal by including poignant accounts of her life experience.   

In her search for assistance in finding expertise and funding for her projects, Dr. Burke Harris came across Kamala Harris, the District Attorney of San Francisco who thought that a way to prevent crime could start with dealing with the drop-out problem.

Dr. Burke Harris wrote:

"Harris was interested in getting to the root of the problem, preventing rather than simply responding to the downstream effects once the chain of violence had been set in motion. Prevention is not something you hear DAs talk about ever day, so when she told me about the redirection program she was developing to keep kids in school, I was seriously interested. I told her I thought she was right and that I believed we could go even further. I had heard about a pediatric emergency doctor in Kansas City, Missouri, that seemed to point to the root of both of our problems.
...
Harris listened intently until I finished, Then she paused and looked me straight in the eye. Nadine, you need to be the one to make all these things come together." (page 119, 121) 

Anyway, I hope that Kamala Harris will be the one to make things come together when she is vice president - such as providing for the needs of children who suffer adversity and creating educational programs which serve the kids who are being left out. 

REALIZING THE DREAM

 I posted this to the Gainesville Quaker blog in July 2021.

March on Washington

Martin Luther King

1963

I Have a Dream excerpt from speech delivered from Lincoln Memorial:

"I say to you today, my friends, though, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream . . . I have a dream that one day in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today ." 

---

If we are open to listening and seeking new experience we are often led in unexpected and surprising directions. When seeking performances by The King's Singers I came across a meditative video which included in the title Bono/U2 arr. Bob Chilcott - MLK.

This is the legend for the recording: "To mark Martin Luther King Day 2018, The King's Singers took a few minutes to record their cover of this song, MLK, by Bono from the band U2. The arrangement is by Bob Chilcott, former tenor in The King's Singers, and it was recorded during in L'Oratoire du Louvre, Paris."

So my next step was to check out Bono and the connection to Martin Luther King.

These are the simple words of the song:

 

"Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized

If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Rain down on him
Mmm
So let it be
Mmm
So let it be

Sleep
Sleep tonight
And may your dreams
Be realized
If the thundercloud
Passes rain
So let it rain
Let it rain
Rain on him"

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Adam Clayton / Dave Evans / Larry Mullen / Paul Hewson [Bono]

 

I found this tribute to King from Bono:

“Dr. King kept us tolerant in a time of terror,” Bono says during his 10-minute tribute. “Kept us faithful to peace and community. Made us believe in joy and justice. Showed us the way to a shared humanity. Dr. King’s voice is louder today than it has ever been. He is one of the true fathers of our American dream.”

Now I wanted to know more about Bono and U2. Searching on Wikipedia through his biography and career as a pop singer, I learned that a tour which the group made in 2014-15 was named Songs of Innocence. The next tour 2017 they named Songs of Experience. A combined Innocence and Experience tour took place in 2018. I needed to know more about the connection of Bono with William Blake who wrote his illuminated poetry titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience in the late 18th century.

Here is what Bono had to say in an Interview with Rolling Stones:

What are the common themes that tie the songs on Songs of Experience together?
I try not to talk about William Blake too much because it sounds pretentious quoting such a literary giant but it was his great idea I pinched to compare the person we become through experience to the person who set out on the journey. If you’re talking about innocence, you’ve probably already lost it but I do believe at the far end of experience, it’s possible to recover it with wisdom. I’m not saying I have much of that but what little I have, I wanted to cram into these songs. I know U2 go into every album like it’s their last one but even more this time I wanted the people around me that I loved to know exactly how I felt. So a lot of the songs are kind of letters, letters to Ali [wife], letters to my sons and daughters, actually our sons and daughters.
...
And one that I didn’t realize until too late that I was writing to myself, “It’s the Little Things Give You Away.” In all of these advice type songs, you are of course preaching what you need to hear. In that sense, they’re all written to the singer. One other piece on Blake, I don’t know if I’m explaining too much here but the best songs for me are often arguments with yourself or arguments with some other version of yourself. Even singing our song “One,” which was half fiction, I’ve had this ongoing fight. In “Little Things,” innocence challenges experience: “I saw you on the stairs, you didn’t notice I was there, that’s cause you were busy talking at me, not to me. You were high above the storm, a hurricane being born but this freedom just might cost you your liberty.”

At the end of the song, experience breaks down and admits his deepest fears, having been called out on it by his younger, braver, bolder self. That same conversation also opens the album with a song called ”Love Is All We Have Left.” My favorite opening line to a U2 album: “There’s nothing to stop this being the best day ever.” In the second verse, innocence admonishes experience: “Now you’re at the other end of the telescope, seven billion stars in her eyes, so many stars so many ways of seeing, hey, this is no time not to be alive.” It’s a chilling moment – in the chorus I was pretending to be Frank Sinatra singing on the moon, a sci-fi torch song “love, love is all we have left, a baby cries on the doorstep, love is all we have left.”

William Blake

Songs of Innocence 

Little Black Boy

Bono quote from the LA Times:

“Songwriting comes from a different place,” he continues. “Music is the language of the spirit. I think ideas and words are our excuse as songwriters to allow our heart or our spirit to run free. That’s when magic happens.”

Dreams, too, come from a different place. We don't own them; they are shared. But the dream of freedom, equality and justice is implemented in individual ways by individuals. Each of us becomes a part of the dream in the way that it can be expressed through us.