It isn’t like The West Wing or Veep or Designated Survivor. So, what, you might ask, is The Kakistocracy about. Well, if you somehow missed Season One, you didn’t miss much . . . except some of the most royal screw ups ever pulled off at the highest levels of government! Season Two promises even more of the same. Some are expecting a catastrophic level of more of the same.
That first season of The Kakistocracy went by the simple tag: “Government by the worst people!” The second season’s tag makes promises:
More government by the worst people . . . only more so!
So that it’s not just a remake of the first season, Season Two promises not even to pretend legitimacy or seriousness and start with the most unqualified buffoons available—from the cold opening! That’s a laugh riot, right there!
And in what industry insiders are calling something of a SPOILER ALERT, The Kakistocracy will be rolling out an extended tagline after the first 100 days:
Join us on a laughable, embarrassing, chaotic romp toward The Idiocracy!
We’ve been wondering when we would have a spinoff, and now it’s looking like we won’t have to wait more than four years to see what the “minds” behind The Kakistocracy have in “mind” for the former greatest nation on Earth.
This might not be the moment to quote one of the white, slave-holding “Founding Fathers,” but in spite of those marks against him, he wrote these prophetic thoughts during the Revolutionary War:
I doubt whether the people of this country would suffer an execution for heresy, or a three years’ imprisonment for not comprehending the mysteries of the Trinity. But is the spirit of the people an infallible, a permanent reliance? Is it government? Is this the kind of protection we receive in return for the rights we give up? Besides, the spirit of the times may alter, will alter. Our rulers will become corrupt, our people careless. A single zealot may commence prosecutor, and better men be his victims. It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united. From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill. It will not then be necessary to resort every moment to the people for support. They will be forgotten, therefore, their rights disregarded. They will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights. The shackles therefore, which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of this war, will remain on us long, will be made heavier and heavier, till our rights shall revive or expire in a convulsion. (emphasis added)
This is from Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1787.
“From the conclusion of this war we shall be going down hill” — Have we hit rock bottom two hundred forty-eight years after July 4, 1776? We can only hope this–and the few years that follow–are the bottom. In the years that come after Donald Trump and his MAGA nightmare are dead and gone, will we rise again to strive toward living up to our founding ideals?
Garbage Man
(with apologies to sanitation workers)
An Indigenous author I admire wrote this about Garbage Man (and nobody has more right to criticize such a white-orange, Euro-American legacy-immigrant than a Native):
Trump is the embodiment of refuse–self-interest and disregard wrapped in decay, like something abandoned in a dumpster. His legacy is a reminder that not all waste is disposable, nor without lasting impact.
The Idiocracy is upon us!
I’m disappointed in US, and I’m embarrassed for US. We have become the village idiots of the world
Looks like liberty has given up on us and moved to . . . Scotland maybe?
Back in the mid-1980s, Don Henley put out a great album titled Building the Perfect Beast. For that project, he wrote a song titled “A Month of Sundays,” in which an old man thinks back on his life and work as he watches life in Reagan’s USA pass in front of him. At one point in the song the lyric goes like this:
My grandson, he comes home from college. He says, “We get the government we deserve.” My son-in-law just shakes his head and says, “That little punk, he never had to serve.”
These lyrics keep playing over in my mind as we approach Election Day 2024. Like the kid coming home from college (I would’ve been about that kid’s age, maybe a little older, when that song came out), I’m thinking we get the government we deserve.
Veterans from the “son-in-law” in this lyric to my father and my friends who served, swore an oath to the U.S. Constitution. Not to the flag or the national anthem. Not to the president. Certainly, not to a man like Donald Trump, who had said that he would like to get rid of the Constitution, undermining and devaluing all the sacrifices made and lives lost. And still, I’m guessing that most of the veterans I know will vote for Trump.
Now, I know many will say that they can’t abide this or that about the liberals, the Democrats, Kamala Harris, and I’m sure I don’t know everything about what she might do as president and might not like everything she might do.
But one thing I feel in my bones is that nothing–NOTHING–Kamala Harris might propose or do threatens the very existence of the United States of America. If any actual Republicans remain out there, a Harris win will be like it’s always been: you live under it for four years and then you get to vote again to try and put your political ideology forward.
I feel just as strongly that if Donald Trump wins, the United States of America will not exist–not as we have known it for going on 250 years–by the time his four years are up. (His four years, I fear, will never be up until he’s passed away.) But the Trumpers (actual Republicans seem no longer to exist in any significant numbers–or they’re all in hiding, hoping that the Trump nightmare will go away), I say, the Trumpers care about nothing but winning. And if he wins this vote, the end of voting is in sight.
If a third world war is brewing with Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran as the aggressors, then Trump is the worst leader we could have. He’s weak and doesn’t know it. He follows after Putin and other dictators like a 12-year-old boy with a crush on the high school football captain. He’s ignorant and doesn’t know it. He’s without talent or savvy and doesn’t know it. Obviously, he’s without any leadership skills. In short, he is without one redeeming quality beyond the common humanness we share that’s buried beneath all of his bullshit.
If the USA actually elects Donald Trump in two weeks, we who made/let it happen will get the government we deserve.
Ye Boomers so afraid of electing a woman of color and so attached to the teats of Trump, how will you survive if you lose your social security benefits (for which you’ve worked for years and years)? Forbes magazine included an article, just a day or so ago, I think, “Trump’s Views On Social Security And Medicare—As Group Warns Funds Could Run Out In 6 Years Under His Plans.”
Are you banking on the belief that he won’t mess with your money and healthcare? You know good and well he will if your benefits will benefit him. He neither cares for nor considers you. (Then a year or so beyond the election he’ll die of old age and cheeseburgers and leave us in the hands of JD Vance.)
My blogging schedule calls for some monthly writing on writing every first Wednesday. I missed it by a couple of days. . . .
So, here’s some brief news about what’s going on in my writing life.
Gabriel’s Songbook audiobook “cover”—photo by Ed Huskey; original design by Andy Reed and Michael Cody; audiobook adaptation by Jamie Reeves
When the Spring 2024 semester ended, I spent a couple of weeks in May driving over the mountain to Asheville, where I wound up at The Talking Book studio to record my own narration of Gabriel’s Songbook. Dave Burr was the engineer, and I had a great time working with and getting to know him. The audiobook is now out in the world. It’s available on a number of platforms—Libro.fm, Spotify, and others. It should appear soon on Audible.
I’m no actor. I’m no voice actor either. But I don’t cringe when listening to the finished version, which makes me think that it’s all right. Give it a listen!
Bouchercon 2024! According to the website, “Bouchercon® is the annual world mystery convention where every year readers, writers, publishers, editors, agents, booksellers and other lovers of crime fiction gather for a 4-day weekend of education, entertainment, and fun!” This is my first time to attend this convention, which meets at the end of this month (August 28 – September 1) in Nashville.
Cover of the Bouchercon Anthology 2024
Every year Bouchercon puts out a call for traditional crime short stories related to the conference’s host city. Having lived in Nashville through my twenties, I thought I’d give it a shot. I’d recently been working on a novel called Streets of Nashville (see below), which features a main character named Ezra MacRae. In the novel, Ezra is about five years into his attempt to establish a viable career as a songwriter, so I thought I would write a short story that explores Ezra’s backstory a little. My submission to the Bouchercon anthology was “I Could Be the One.” It tells of Ezra’s first days/months/year in Nashville as he tries to find his footing on Music Row. I looked through my song catalog and landed on an old piece of mine—”I Could Be the One,” of course. (Read more about the song here.)
The story was accepted and will be included in the Bouchercon anthology for the Nashville conference! I look at this as a fine feather in my cap. The anthology will debut at the conference and afterwards be available wherever books are sold. I still love Nashville, even more than thirty years gone from it, so I’m looking forward to reading the other stories in the anthology as well.
I wrote “I Could Be the One” in October 2023. As soon as I finished it, I jumped on another anthology opportunity.
I spent November 2023 writing “Carolina,” based on Texas songwriter Robert Earl Keen’s song of the same name. It’s a bit of a murder ballad and includes suggestions of a man perhaps murdering his lover while sleepwalking. Whether he’s sleepwalking or not, he finds her (after she’s left him) and then wakes up later to find her dead.
This scenario immediately made me think of my work with the writings of Charles Brockden Brown, who wrote a couple of pieces in the late 18th / early 19th centuries about sleepwalking and murder. The first is his novel Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). In 1805, Brown published a piece of short fiction titled “Somnambulism. A Fragment.” In this story, a young man named Althorpe fearfully obsesses over the safety of his beloved on a nighttime trip she is beginning with her father. Althorpe walks in his sleep and finds her in the night and murders her, bringing his obsessive fears to life—without knowing it.
In the song, the ill-fated girl is named Lily. I kept the name for my story and made her the centerpiece of a conflict between two men: the violent Al Thorpe and Asheville PD detective Eddie Huntly. This story was so much fun to write!
“Carolina” will appear in Madville Publishing‘s Wild Wind: Poems and Stories Inspired by the Songs of Robert Earl Keen. The book is scheduled for release on November 19 and will be available wherever books are sold.
Streets of Nashville is my second novel (third book of fiction). On April 15, 2025, Madville Publishing will release the novel into the wild world (whatever form that takes after the November election)! From the above, you can gather that its main character is a songwriter named Ezra MacRae, five years into his attempt to establish a viable career on Nashville’s Music Row. I won’t say much more about it right now. Madville’s editor and I are working with the final proofs of the text, so I should soon have an advance reading opportunity available for pre-release reviews. In the meantime, you can read the query letter that I sent to Madville, which led to acceptance and the start of the publishing process. (Thanks to the great Alex Kenna for providing this query letter space!)
This is a secret cover reveal! I’ll do a more public one on my socials as soon as the text of the book is finalized. For now, we’ll see if anybody actually reads this blog. And if anybody does, they’re the first to lay eyes on this cover.
“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) is an empty slogan that sways only those unable to consider its meaning (or rather its lack of meaning). In the right world context and with the right motivations and considerations of all, I could perhaps get behind the idea “Make America Great” (again, as long as the implication is not “and to hell with the rest”), but the addition of “Again” throws the phrase into nonsense. Simply put, never was there a time in the past—implied by “Again”—when the U.S. met every possible definition of “Great” for every individual citizen existing at that time. Absolutely never. Regardless of which political ideologues (so-called conservatives or so-called liberals) might wield such a slogan, it rallies only thoughtless, selfish people who interpret it according to some imaginary time/place they’ve romanticized the country as being good for them and their kind (and probably only for them and their kind).
Back in 2014, Leesa and I traveled with a group of friends to Vimperk, a small town in the southwestern portion of the Czech Republic (aka Czechia). A bunch of us lived for a week in a hostel on Vimperk’s beautiful cobblestone square. At least that’s where we slept. During the day, we were on the run, offering a softball camp for youth and English camp for adults. In the evenings, we did a good bit of sightseeing.
In the middle of that week, I played a concert for the town. We found advertisements for this event scattered around Vimperk when we arrived.
It was a terrific experience all around.
In 2015, Leesa and I decided—for a number of reasons—not to go back, but we really missed the place and the people and turned our eyes toward 2016. Meantime, I began to think about a song for Vimperk.
One of the surprising things about that 2014 trip came in the form of good sleep. I’m a white-noise sleeper. I keep a fan running beside the bed every night, not for the breeze but for the steady sound of it. Not only would the hostel where we slept be without a steady hum to lull me to sleep, but also there were bells. Bells, bells, bells all through the night. The clock tower in the square rings its bells every fifteen minutes—one bell for the quarter hour, two for the half, three for a quarter ’til, four for the hour with these last followed by the deeper, louder bell tolling the hour itself. I couldn’t very well pack a fan for the trip, so I bought some melatonin and hoped for the best.
But it wasn’t long before something—the Old-World ambiance; tiredness from travel and engaging with the Czechs (young and not so young); running to take in the sights; something—lulled me to sleep and gave me a good night’s rest every night. Sure, I was to some degree roused from sleep every quarter hour, but rather than being annoyed at the interruption or unable to get back to sleep, I felt a distinct sense of peace and comfort from lying down to rising up.
During 2015, when I both wanted to write a song for Vimperk and knew, at the same time, I couldn’t go back that year, the image of those bells became the spark that lit my way into the lyric.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
That’s where the song started.
I’m not going to write much here about what went into the two verses. Suffice to say that they contrast the two worlds as I thought about them at that moment. The first verse is set somewhere like Johnson City or Asheville or Nashville, the second in Vimperk. You should be able to figure out my feelings about these contrasting cultural experiences.
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
So, that’s the first verse. Here’s the second.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men on the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
I was told at the beginning of the 2014 trip that many Czechs love John Denver’s “Country Roads.” (Actually, I learned many years later that they prefer a Czech version from one of their own singers.) When we first arrived at the door of our hostel on the cobblestone square, a small festival of some sort festival was happening. On a stage beneath the clock tower, an accordion band was playing—can you believe it?—”Country Roads”!
To the bridge!
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk . . .
The bridge of the song tries to feel its way to an idea I find difficult to express. Vimperk has been there in hills so much like our own for more than twice the lifetime of the U.S. In 2014, our final team meal was at a home on a hill above Vimperk. The house itself was as old as the US. Pictured below, the Black Gate on the hillside beneath the castle was built in 1479, which is a century and a half before the Puritan Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts Bay to establish Plymouth Plantation (1620).
I feel certain that the place’s feeling younger (while being so much older) has to do with a number of things. First, I’m sure those of us who love Vimperk and the people we know there tend to romanticize its Old-World beauty, the slower pace of a small town, the foreignness and yet familiarity of it, a kind of fairytale quality that radiates from its castle and cobblestones and surrounding forests. We don’t see the drugs, which are surely there. We don’t see much if any of the poverty, which is surely there. We don’t see much of its prejudices—against the Roma (so-called “Gypsies”), for example. We don’t see much of the ignorance and meanness and violence that are surely there as well—I mean, come on, they’re mostly igno-arrogant white people like us, aggressive and colonizing in both large (global) and small (local) ways.
What we do sometimes see, however, at least among most of those we come in contact with, is a way of relating to one another that often seems lost here. One quick example: in the softball camp setting, an atmosphere of caring for each other and cooperating with each other is evident. Rarely here in the U.S. would you see teens willing to play with the little kids without being made to do so. That happens all the time at camp without any teen tantrums. At lunch, you’ll find tables made of up teens who are sitting and eating with kids much younger than themselves.
So, anyway, Leesa and I returned to Vimperk in 2016, and I performed another concert and enjoyed the opportunity to play “The Bells of Vimperk” for our friends in Vimperk. Below is a phone video of that performance.
Performing “The Bells of Vimperk” for the first time in Vimperk on Tuesday, 12 July 2016
Recently I played a backyard concert at the Barnett Patio here in Johnson City, and my son Raleigh sat in on bass (along with my friend Jimmy on percussion). I don’t know if Raleigh had ever even heard “The Bells of Vimperk,” but at the end of the night, he said, “Deddy, that might be your best song.” I’ll take that!
This is a noisy world that clamors for my short attention— Talking heads that blather on and on and on. The streets are filled with sirens—some real and some legendary— From the setting to the rising of the sun. Come Friday night the bars are loud and crowded with the lonely, Seeking some attention or some means of escape. I leave my car downtown and take a taxi home, Where stone awake my mind drifts half a world away.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
Music echoes through the sunlit streets of cobblestone. It’s “Country Roads” by an accordion band. And the old men no the stage hold lovers in their laps and squeeze them, Making the music everyone can understand. Come Friday night the pub’s alive with flutes and fiddles and guitars That long past midnight fade to soft lullabies, Sung in harmonies that carry me home, Where warm and weary I lie down and close my eyes.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
The world is older there, But it’s somehow younger, too. When the ground beneath my feet is shaken, I go there and find my faith renewed.
The bells of Vimperk ring the quarter hour through the night. Hear their voices on the air! And the bells of Vimperk sing that everything’s all right—sleep tight. All is well down in the square . . . and quite like a prayer.
“This Is Not All” is a new song that has been with me for a while. In fact, I’ve had much of it written for several years, so I suppose it’s more accurate to say that it’s a newly completed song. It’s so newly completed that I haven’t even learned it yet. Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to play it at a recent gig on the Barnett Patio. I flubbed a bunch of it, especially toward the end, but it’s now out there in the world. I’ll continue to work on the music, but I feel like the lyrics are finished and say what I want them to say.
The first verse began with hiking a trail—going on a ramble, as my friend Scott Honeycutt calls it. The lines borrow some sentiments from Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson (and many others, I’m sure). We too often go out into nature, as Emerson and Thoreau caution us, looking for the big payoff in the scenery—a dramatic waterfall, the colors of autumn leaves, the mountaintop view of distance (even to the moon). Emerson writes in “Beauty,” the third chapter of Nature, “Go out of the house to see the moon, and ’tis mere tinsel; it will not please as when its light shines upon your necessary journey.”
But the trail offers much at which to wonder that is seen only if we turn our eyes away from the big picture, away from the big expectations, and look down—not necessarily down, but just look.
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
I like the last two lines in particular. Have you ever thought about how wonderful it is that you can—as long as you have a sound mind—find your way home? And you probably know many different ways to get home. Consider the Keb’ Mo’ song “More Thank One Way Home.” Take that as realistically or metaphorically as you wish.
As for the last line, Emily Dickinson writes in her poem 446 (Franklin; “This was a Poet”) that the poet
Distills amazing sense From Ordinary Meanings – And Attar* so immense
From the familiar species That perished by the Door – We wonder it was not Ourselves Arrested it – before –
(*Attar = fragrance)
Here, Dickison suggests—as Emerson does in his essay “The Poet”—that the poet (or the poetic eye) sees the richness, even the strangeness and wonder, in the familiar. Although those without the poet’s vision are subject to a kind of “ceaseless Poverty,” we still have the potential to understand and be enriched through that vision. That is, once the poet points out the wonder in the “familiar species / That perished by the Door”—”that flower I never noticed by the door”—we are enriched second-hand.
The second verse of “This Is Not All” sticks with wonder and the wonderful:
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
The idea here is that when we travel, whether on the road or trail or metaphorically through life, we often let the destination or goal loom so large in our minds that we ignore or lose sight of what is wonderful “along the way.” Consider the old adage that the journey is more important than the destination. The “little boy” is my son Raleigh, who had a vivid imagination and a love of costume.
The image of the other boy is from my travels at some point some years ago. I was driving in Indiana or Illinois or Iowa—somewhere with corn to the horizon. Just off the interstate was a large farmhouse, a big barn to the right of it (in the background, corn to the horizon from which a storm approached). In the barnyard, this kid—a teenager, at least—sat behind a full drum set and seemed in the middle of a massive rock ‘n’ roll show drum solo. A vivid, amazing scene!
The cartwheeling and hitchhiking girls are less real images than they are contrasts in innocence and experience, security and danger. But each of these has in it an element of wonder.
The song takes a dark turn to look at evil. The third verse recognizes that we leave ourselves open to the threatening workings of evil if we believe that it exists only in obvious places—”the terrorist and thief.”
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that pit them against us.
Ignorance is possibly the worst evil in our world today. Many of us seem to be getting to the point where we can’t see anything except through the lenses of ignorance, rage, and prejudice, our desire to win at all cost (while too ignorant to count the ultimate cost), our desire to “own” ______ [insert your fear/hate here], the devotion of our time and minds and hearts to conspiracy (which even if real probably has little to do with you and your little you might brighten). Charles Dickens wrote in his last scene with the Ghost of Christmas Present about “a boy and girl” that Scrooge spots hiding under the skirts of the Ghost’s robe, children [y]ellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish. . . .” When Scrooge asks if they are the children of the Ghost of Christmas Present, the spirit answers,
“‘They are Man’s. . . . And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it! . . . Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse! And bide the end!'”
Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
In our devaluing of education and of ourselves along with it, we have opened the door wide to all sorts of evil. The ignorant parents and grandparents and legislators slander teachers as misleading and “indoctrinating” their students. The ignorant revel in their ignorance as their badge of difference from the educated and the expert. (This is what Dickens refers to when he writes, “Admit it for your factious [that is, divisive] purposes, and make it worse!”). Thomas Jefferson—author of the U.S. Declaration of Independence—wrote elsewhere that “the spirit of the people [is not] infallible” and we “will become . . careless. A single zealot may commence persecutor, and better men be his victims.” I think the “single zealot” is now among us in Donald Trump, who is Dickens’s boy Ignorance personified. Beware! “Deny it” and experience the “Doom” he brings.
And yet perhaps there is still goodness. Fear and hate cannot survive honest expressions of love between people, between peoples, between us. Someone who becomes friends with—who comes to love—that which is feared, be it a skin color or a faith system or an identity (LGBTQ+) or whatever, usually finds it difficult, if not impossible, to fear and hate the person that has now become, to them, a human being—recognizing another as a human being, as a child of God (if you will). And that’s what it’s about, I think, opening up of ourselves to see the humanity in everybody. It is in this recognition and love that fear and hate begin to wither and die for lack of nourishment.
That said, I suspect we’re too far gone into ignorance—and an arrogance that prevents us from recognizing our ignorance—to survive.
Still, for the song, I lifted up my mind and heart and wrote a bridge and a fourth verse and tied it all together with a refrain “This Is Not All,” which first appears after the second verse and then repeats after the third and at the end.
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
This Is Not All
Not all the wonder along the trail is to be found in woods and sky— look closer. It’s the tiny frog hidden in clover and that creature in the dust with a hundred legs or more. It’s in how I find my way home and that flower I never noticed by the door.
Not all the wonder along the way is waiting somewhere far ahead— look closer. A little boy runs in cape and mask, another stands shirtless in a barnyard banging a drum. A little girl learns to cartwheel, And another stands by the road and sticks out her thumb.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
Not all the evil in the world is in the terrorist and thief— look closer. It’s in the thousand faces of ignorance— political and corporate and religious. It’s in the hate and hunger and the trumped-up fights that put them against us.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
The means of control are more than out of our hands— they’re far beyond our reach. But we can love, and love’s the root and height of all and love’s the root and height of each.
Not all the goodness in the world is to be found in church and child— look closer. It’s in the unshackled hearts that lift us high above the right or wrong or Right or Left— my friend’s warm hand in mine and true emotions honestly expressed.
This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than we can own, more than we can protect. This is not all, no, this is not all! Out there is more than can be known, so much more than we expect. This is not all!
