Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘I was saying to someone recently, who expressed something similar, that there’s a part of me that wishes certain songs on the record were not relevant right now. My expectation was that we wouldn’t be here. I really believed we were going to be in a better place, with more justice and more equity and less violence.

But I think, between the 16-year-old who wrote “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” and the 61-year-old sitting here with you now, that my values are the same. I still have the same concerns. I still want the same changes that I did at that time. But I certainly have a different perspective. Having grown up in the ’70s and being a beneficiary of the civil rights movement, at a time when things started to look up, I think my expectation was that we’d just keep building on that.

I was recently watching a documentary about [the civil rights activist] Fannie Lou Hamer, and she’s from Mississippi. My grandparents are from Mississippi, and I think I hadn’t really made the connection that in the 1960s, Black people in Mississippi still didn’t have the right to vote. My grandparents left the South in the Great Migration and moved to Cleveland. I think it changed the course of their lives, but it ultimately changed the course of mine, too.

The thing that I take from it is that, now that I’m older, is that it’s this constant practice that needs to occur. A constant vigilance. You can’t expect that things will hold.’ (from the New York Times)

This article was a heart-warming read.