The Responsibility of Storytelling

A year or so ago, I took my eldest son, Graeme, to a Frank Turner concert. He started out straight up punk, with the band Million Dead, then moved to a sort of folk punk sound and has, more or less with England Keep My Bones, moved to folk or pop, though with the same raw honesty and simple song structures I, at least, associate with punk.

This is an important detail to this story because the incident I'm about to relate happened on the way home from that concert. Our throats were raw, we were slightly we from the sort of drizzly rain that Boston seems to specialize in during early summer, and we were both kind of ... open. I've talked before about his latest album, Be More Kind, but it's basically a love letter to humanity, a centrist's plea for us to maybe stop being jerks to each other for a bit and see how that works out. After two and a half hours of that man performing and chatting with his audience like we were all long-lost friends and lovers, I was looking at people with a different eye.

One of the things I really like about going to Boston is, not everyone's from New Hampshire. Let me explain.

I love New Hampshire. I have lived her for twenty years and, God willing, I will die here, however there's a sameness to the place, especially in our bucolic little rural town. There are perhaps a dozen different phenotypes for the various human features, and eventually you see all of them combined in all of the ways you can reasonable expect them to be and you're sort of done. One face sort of blurs into the next after a bit, or it can if you're lazy.

Boston doesn't let you be lazy. You have people from a dozen different small towns dressed up like a city all packed into the same place, and there's just a stunning variety of humanity.

So, on the subway back to the train station, I took them in. An Asian woman with brilliant purple nails, reading a weathered copy of Asimov's Foundation, her nails periodically dipping into the contents of the burrito laying across her lap. A gaggle of sixteen-something girls, ohmygodding over life, the universe and everything. An older couple, both with their backs to me, their heads nodding against each other, his voice a velvet baritone, hers a husky alto. A gigantic man with a muscle shirt advertising a gym, protein shake in hand, glaring around, not like he's looking for a fight, but rather like he's ready for a fight if it presents itself.

The writer part of my brain is fascinated by this man. His bare arms are just a landscape of muscle, ridges and definition in places where I'm pretty sure I don't even have tissue, with a howling dog high on his right bicep, the dark green of the ink somehow popping out against the brown-olive of his skin. The bag of his shoulder clanks when the train moves and clearly contains some weights, but he doesn't seem to have to even sway to accommodate the shift in weight. He's holding the protein shake in his right hand and I can see calluses on his knuckles, most notably on the middle finger.

Who is he? A mob hoodlum? Amateur MMA fighter? Pro MMA fighter? He could be. We hit a bump and his protein shake falls out of his hand and he catches it before it hits the ground, those giant muscles flexing and bending almost faster than my eye can follow.

We stop. The older couple leaves. I never actually saw their faces, so I'm going to continue to pretend that they really were Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, immortals who ran away from Hollywood and the mess of their lives to spend their days in obscurity in Boston. The gaggle leaves as well, along with much of the energy of the subway car, and I again reflect on how, "Youth is wasted on the young," is only something that can be said by a cynic, because they seem to be taking full advantage of it.

A few others come on, including a woman about half the size of my new gym-attending pugilist friend, who immediately walks over to him, ranting about how stressful her day was at work. His face immediately softens and I can tell that the only person in the world for him right then is her. A man offers him a seat, but she declines, instead using her boyfriend as an anchor as she continues to vent about the pettiness of office politics and a particular co-worker who's really working her last nerve.

Her ranting rises and falls in pitch and speed, and when it gets faster, I can easily pick up some distinct traits of a Chicano accent. She also runs her one free hand through her dark curly hair constantly and emphasizes her speech with a whole lot of intentional comic impressions of her co-workers, although I get the feeling that her impression of Sherida might border on the racist. Still, Sherida sounds like a real pill, so, hey, no judgement from me.

It takes two more stops for her to get to the end of it, and it's only two more stops from there that my son and I need to exit and some part of me feels the need to fast forward their conversation because I want to know how this ends, darn it. Thankfully, gym guy doesn't let me down.

"That sucks, babe. When we get home, I'll give you a shoulder rub with them scented oils." His voice is far higher pitched than I expected it to be and he pronounces "oils" very oddly, saying it as though the letter "i" doesn't modify its sound at all. Her reaction startles him: she punches him, hard, in the shoulder he's using to hold his gym bag, hard enough that it makes him do what the rickety subway tracks couldn't - he has to sway to keep control of it.

"Stop it," she says, firmly. "You're smarter than that, and you know it. They're 'essential oils,' and you showed me to them. Why do you do this? Why do you hide yourself behind this meathead body you've made yourself. You're so smart! You could ..." She doesn't finish. The day has spent the last bit of her energy and she all but collapses onto him, in an image I've seen before. When the one you love is the source of your pain, sometimes you still fall on them for solace. And he gives it to her, wrapping a massive arm around her torso and holding her close, the howling dog facing out at the world.

His face is fallen, realizing that his woman's hurt and he was a cause of some of that pain, but his tat still sends a clear message: if anyone else wants to hurt her, you come through me first.

Our stop is next. Graeme and I step out and head home, and I ponder that situation on the drive back as he dozes in the passenger seat. I think about the frankly kind of vile assumptions I made about my gym friend, and what that means to the stories that I tell. I mean, that's pretty much my thing: I'm a storyteller, and because I'm a human storyteller, I do embellish and add details here and there because I can't know everything, and my mind fills in the gaps, often without me even being entirely aware that it's doing so.

If I only told stories my own benefit, that would be one thing, but I don't. I share these stories with my kids, with my friends, and some times with larger audiences. I wrote plays and skits for my church, and some of those end up on video, so my audience, theoretically, everyone. That means that even if the stories I tell aren't important, I still have a responsibility to make sure that the stories I tell have some kind of value, and that if people can't trust that every detail of the story is 100% accurate, then at least that the story serves some kind of purpose.

How to protest, or, treating people as things

So, by now most of you have seen, or at least heard of, a Native American man being stared down by a young man in a MAGA hat while he plays a drum quite close to him. I commented about it with a quote from a favourite author.

First, I want to address the narrative of what happened. There's an apparently common conception that the young men in the video went and surrounded him. They did not - Nathan Phillips approached the group, playing a peace song, and then the young man the in the video was either pushed by the crowd or chose to confront the man, standing perhaps a foot away and almost touching the drum he was playing.

According to Mr. Phillips' account, and based on the video, he was shouted at by students, and while there are no chaperones in sight, he claims that they did as well, and that some of them chanted "build that wall." I honestly see no reason to doubt his account of the events - using Trump-related propaganda to intimidate already has a history, and we don't have a full video of what occurred.

So, that's the event, so far as we can see or interpret it. There are some additional pieces we can tease out that add to the context. Mr. Phillips has been protesting for longer than I've been alive, is a Vietnam veteran, and a man with a good reputation across pretty well all First Nations groups. The young man is wearing a hat in apparent support of a man who uses the name of a Native American heroine as an insult. There are others, but there's another wrinkle on this that made me think of Terry Pratchett's admonition that evil begins when you start seeing people as things: these boys were on a school field trip to protest abortion in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

My thoughts on abortion are complicated, to say the least, but as a general rule I've decided to refer to myself as being "pro-baby." That is, I want the national economy, the social structure and health care to all be designed such that any woman who wants to have a baby can do so and both mother and child will have the opportunity to thrive. Since we're nowhere close to having any of those things be true, and given the way the politics of abortion have, I believe, tarnished and distorted Christianity and other people's view of Christianity, I don't think that I could, in good conscience, protest abortion and consider it to be something God believes I ought to do. Again, I've arrived at this opinion though a complicated series of steps, but one of them involves a three-week period in 1994.

I was a kind of nerdy kid, still pretty fresh from a very small, close-knit Christian private school and all but thrown into the largest high school in my town, but I had some friends and some confidantes. I was a sarcastic ball of hormones and fear, but around those friends I could relax and be more like the person you've met if you've met me recently. It was in this context that one of my friend's girlfriends approached me.

She was pregnant. The father wasn't my friend, but some guy she met at a party, who'd gotten her drunk, raped her, and left her there. It was the sort of party where that kind of behaviour could easily happen and be covered up, the sort that Good Girls Don't Go To, and she was more terrified of her parents finding out about the party and the pregnancy than anything else, it seemed. She hadn't been to a doctor yet, but she'd been getting nauseous every morning, and she'd missed her period for two months straight, which she never did, and could I help her, please, please?

I honestly had no idea what to do, but she was a friend, and she was desperate, so I wasn't going to let her alone. I sincerely believed it was my Christian duty to help to the extent that I could, and to keep her counsel to myself unless she let me talk about it with someone. I asked if I could, as I had a friend that I thought could help and between the three of us we figured out a plan to take her to a local women's health clinic where she could get help, hopefully anonymously.

The first visit was on a cold and rainy Saturday in March. The doctor was a man in his mid-50s, with a kind face, and a strangely shaped, conical skull that looked like it had simply pushed through his hairdo, leaving a ring of hair around his head like the snowline around the edge of Mount Everest's peak. He was comical in the interview, too, until he realized that wasn't the set of bedside skills he needed and became quite serious. Blood was drawn, tests were made and in the next week it was confirmed that she was pregnant, about three months along, and could you come in again, please?

The next Saturday, the doctor was far more serious. The tests confirmed pregnancy, but also revealed that the fetus was far less developed than it should be. More tests were necessary.

On Tuesday, she didn't come to school. She had a serious fever, couldn't keep food down, and was bleeding from, as our president would say, her wherever. The doctor called that same day to tell us the bad news - the placenta hadn't adhered properly and was likely to tear free completely, potentially leading to hemorrhage. With her symptoms, she was brought in for examination and likely surgery at a nearby outpatient clinic.

I left school in the middle of the day, giving some no-doubt creative excuse, and when we got to the clinic, I discovered that evidently the women's health clinic had protesters, but only during the week. There were six or seven of them, standing on either side of the walk leading up to the clinic, yelling at the men and women who were going in. One of them wasn't much older than me, and he was particularly histrionic, waving his sign in front of women's face in particular and shouting some pretty vile stuff at them.

As we made our way up the walk, my friend already in tears, our drive holding her and charging ahead like a fullback, I made an especial effort to head off the young man with his sign. When he moved to block our path, I knocked the sign, intending to just knock it away, but instead knocking it away. He moved as though intending to charge my pregnant friend, and I put my hand on his chest and asked him not to.

I don't remember the entire conversation in detail, but I do remember asking him, Christian to Christian, to not harass us because we were already dealing with something serious and he wasn't helping, and that his consistent response was, "It's my right to peacefully protest."

I asked him to identify with us as people, as individuals, as creations of God with feelings and needs and wants, with pains and sorrow and a deep, abiding need for grace and mercy, and he refused to do so, just reiterating his right, over and over, to treat us as objects for his rights to be acted upon. I don't know when it began in him, exactly, what it was that did it, but that, right there was evil.

I wish I could tell you that my friend's story had a happy ending, but it doesn't. It's not mine to tell, frankly, both because anything further could reveal who she is, and because the story is hers, and not mine from this point onward. I only tell it to pass on one of the lessons it taught me:

Evil begins by treating people as things, and when we choose to stand against a perceived injustice in a manner that treats people as things, evil is the inevitable result.

Goodbye Greg Stafford; Hello Greg Stafford

Wargaming - creating artificial armies in order to act or reenact military conflicts - is older than chess, but the real stuff, with maps, miniatures and rules, was more or less restricted to the elite, who could afford them. This lasted until the late 19th century, when the wealth of the middle class began to close in on the wealth of the upper class. In the early 20th century, H.G. Wells, known more for being one of the founding fathers of specfic, codified rules for wargaming. These rules covered real world military units and were intended to be used chiefly for reenacting, but, while we have no actual evidence of this, observation of modern wargamers would seem to indicate that they were used for more than this purpose.

The first incident of fantasy wargaming that we have on record dates from 1916, although it's indirectly reported. Canadian author Timothy Findley, who interviewed a large number of WWI veterans and used their stories in his own fiction, recounts a couple of officers who, after hours, would take the little standees on the battle map and re-run the battles of the day, arguing over the relative strengths and abilities of the individual units. Warhammer fans know how that goes.

Why is it fantasy wargaming? They re-ran the battles in an effort to minimize casualties, reducing the loss of life in what remains one of the bloodiest, most horrific wars in history.

Wargaming became a much bigger and more formal sort of thing post WWII, both because some returning soldiers maintained an interest in military matters, and because of the discovery of a process by which the expense pewter and lead miniatures could be replaced with rubber models.

Still, this was mostly real-world stuff - musketeers, Hussar cavalry, German tanks and the like.

At this point, tradition would have me start talking about Chainmail, Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons and the like, but I'm going off in a different direction today, one that I'd argue is just as important, if not more so: Greg Stafford.

Greg Stafford was an English major with a prolific imagination, and a nascent interest in shamanism, and he had this idea for an interactive fantasy world called "Glorantha." No publishers wanted it, so he created a company to produce it - Chaosium.

Over the ensuing decades, he would create, or, with assistance, create RuneQuest, Pendragon and Call of Chtulhu. While TSR sued its fans for producing and sharing their own content, Stafford and company created an environment of collaboration. There aren't as many, say, RuneQuest fans as there are D&D players, but those fans are dedicated in no small part because of the excellence of the game's founder.

That love of creating stuff with other people, which is at the heart of roleplaying, doesn't solely originate in Greg Stafford, but if that optimistic collaboration has a patron saint, it would be him.

Well, it would've been him. He died a day or so ago. But. BUT. Every time you sit around a table with a group of people and make up stories together, rolling dice, swilling Mountain Dew and laughing, Greg Stafford remains. I get the feeling he's going to be around for a while.

Phalacrocoracidae, Simeon and Tapdancing

Part One: Phalacrocoracidae

The family Phalacrocoracidae is home to some 40 species of birds. Most well-known are
the cormorants, but the family also includes the very unfortunately named “shags.”
They’re tall sea-birds with long beaks adapted for eating slender fish and eels. Typically
saltwater, some varieties have adapted (some would say re-adapted) to inland seas. There
are some three species common in New Hampshire, all with dark plumage and the typical
wing-drying behaviour of the family. This behaviour isn’t widely studied, but in all species
studied thus far, it appears that the feather layers are actually water permeable, so after
any length of soak, they have to dry by the side of the water before resuming fishing.

They aren’t as sociable as gulls, but typically live in small family groups, and while they
tend to avoid humans they have no special fear of them and can be found on piers and
docks, and in backyard ponds. Because their diet consists mostly of “feeder fish” for the
kinds of fish that humans like to eat, they’re often regarded as a nuisance species.

Part Two: Simeon

I love the Gospels. While I tend to find myself navigating through the prophets or
rereading Ecclesiastes or James, I make a conscious effort to re-read them Gospels at
least once a year, just to refresh my memory. It’s always a worthwhile read and I pick up
on something that I missed the last time around.

The story of Simeon, which is only found in Luke’s gospel, is not one of those hidden
stories. The short of it that a Jewish man was told by God Himself that he would not pass
from Earth without seeing The Messiah and, when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus into
the temple at 40 days old, he held him and said a prayer over him. He gave him back to his
parents, telling them their child would bless the world, although Jesus would also suffer
terribly.

And that’s it. A few minutes contact with the divine and Simeon exits the stage. The text doesn’t spell it out
entirely clearly, but in context with what he said, Simeon might well have gone home and died that night, his
destiny and his desire fulfilled.

Part Three: Tapdancing

As with many American forms of dance, tapdancing is … well, complicated, when it comes to its historical
roots, and even to its modern presentation.

Drawing from Irish, English, African and possibly Dutch rhythmic dancing traditions, tapdancing is basically
the dancing art of tapping metal plates on the toe and heel of specially made shoes in a pattern. It dates back
to the 1800s or so, and was a common element of minstrel shows. During the days of vaudeville, dancers
began to add more arm movements, and by the jazz age it was very much the freewheeling style of
tapdancing that’s still evolving, but would be recognizable to an audience today.

As a dance style, it’s most commonly associated with African-American performers, and, based on its early
associations with minstrel shows, some artists have suggested that perhaps tapdancing should be phased
out in favour of more inclusive, less racially-charged forms of dance but, well.

Dule Hill, mostly know for his role as Ovaltine Jenkins on the TV show “Psych,” has said that tapdancing feels
“liberating.” The proof is in the footwork, I think.

Part Four: The Story

On Monday, I went to my son’s dance studio. He’s fifteen, so usually I just drop him off and head back home,
but that particular day I needed to go in to see if his tap shoes had arrived, and to pay for them if they had.

On entering, there were between ten and one hundred people milling about the lobby as two classes were
nearing their end and parents, brothers and sisters milled around. I tried to penetrate through to the front
desk, but there were just too many people. I waited my turn as parents and kids cycled past Kris, one of the
heads of the studio, with their questions, comments and concerns. When I got to her, we exchanged
pleasantries and then she looked out at the nearby highway, cried out, “There’s a duck in the road!” ran out
from behind the desk and outside.

I stood inside, staring at the place where the air was still rushing in to replace Kris’ now-absent form, mouth
somewhat agape, but soon rallied and looked outside. There was indeed a large bird in the middle of the
highway, and as I watched she ran into traffic and guided the bird off the highway and into the relative safety
of a small side street. As she continued her efforts to corral the bird to safety, a minivan turns down the side
street.

At that distance it was impossible to see the actual conversation that ensued, but soon the driver of the
minivan was parked at an angle on the road, and she and Kris were working together with the bird. The
minivan blocked our view, though, so I and the other inhabitants of the dance studio lobby watched and
craned out necks, waiting for her to come back. Soon enough she did, her jacket off and carrying something
inside it, cuddled to her front like a lost child, or a damaged seabird.

She skittered inside and confirmed that she did, indeed, have a seabird wrapped in her jacket and could
someone be a dear and see about getting a blanket because the bird was rather larger to carry to a vet’s
office in a windbreaker.

My trunk is a place of mystery. Even I don’t know exactly what’s in there, but one thing I remembered is that it
still held a costume I wore a few Christmases ago when I played the role of Simeon in a play at church. It was
a large robe on me, and since I periodically wake from a nap to find parties of explorers trying to spelunk
inside me, that meant it was just enormous. I rushed out to the car and found it, and ran back in.

I was outside for perhaps a minute, but in that time the bird had gotten loose and pecked Kris on the bridge of
the nose. She still held it in her arms, but now had a hand holding the bird’s beak shut. That was when I
realized what she’d realized earlier - this wasn’t a duck. The beak was simply too long and slender.

She made her way into the passenger seat of an SUV belonging to a dance mom who’d agreed to drive her to
the vet’s office and they were off. When I returned to pick up Graeme, she was back and reported that the
bird was indeed a cormorant, that it had a broken wing and would be referred to the New Hampshire
Department of Fish and Game to be rehabilitated and returned to the wild.

Part Five - Conclusion

By population, there are approximately five million members of the family Phalacrocoracidae, worldwide.
Assuming that this was a female handling a brood of young, Kris saved the life of, well, just the one adult
because nature’s cruel that way. That seems like a great deal of fuss over one life in five million, but it was an
act of kindness, and that is, so far as I’ve ever been able to determine, its own justification.

Be more kind.

Part Six - Denouement

The tap shoes had come in, but they were the wrong size.

The House With A Clock In Its Walls

First, it must be understood that even when I was a very small child, I was quite convinced that my next-door neighbour, Mrs. Ireland, was a witch. She lived in a large house in the middle of a large piece of property in the middle of the city, a creaky, drafty place with more history to it than any couple could actually need, she could make macaroni and cheese sauce with cheese, milk and flour and no orange powder whatsoever and, oh, yes, she could read minds.

How do I know this? Well, as soon as I concluded that she was a witch, she gave a box of books to my parents that just happened to include The Witch Family, a children's book about a crazy old hag of a witch whose nasty temper is mollified by being around a young child. I got the message. I got the other part of the message, too, that while she might be a crazy old hag of a witch some of the time, it was my solemn duty to be near enough to her that she didn't turn me, or anyone in my family, into a toad. This was made easier by the fact that, at least when I was around, she was a very nice witch indeed.

Nevertheless, it was with some trepidation that I went up to her cottage, just our family and the two of them alone for a weekend in the middle of Northern Ontario where, I imagined, one could boil an entire family alive and no one would ever know. Still, I would be there so she was likely to be a very nice witch. And she was, mostly, except for that first night.

My dad read books to me a lot when I was a child, and that weekend was to be no different, but the drive up to the cottage, hefting everything into the house, and dealing with my sister's whinging - I was a perfectly obedient child, of course - had left him rather obviously exhausted, and so Mrs. Ireland volunteered to read a chapter of one of her favourite books. We vanished upstairs, me taking the steps at as rapid a pace as I could manage as Mrs. Ireland did have excellent taste in books and had read books to me before, her smooth pleasant tones wrapping around into various voices that varied from comedic to serious.

She read the first chapter of The House With A Clock In Its Walls and it was quite unlike anything I'd ever heard. The story was old-fashioned, taking place in the late 40s, but it still felt very modern and I identified with the main character, pudgy Lewis, unlike anyone else then or since, but it was the language of the book that attracted me. I understood every image and phrase, but they were so mature and confident, so refined and grown-up sounding, and they rolled around in my head like rolling a luscious bite of ice cream in one's mouth.

I loved it. And the first chapter was over in about fifteen minutes. She snapped the book shut with authority and put it down on the dresser, just out of reach.

"Did you like that, Jimmy?" she asked. The light of the bedside lamp reflected off of her glasses, hiding her eyes behind the shine, and so I didn't dare risk anything more than a nod and a quiet, "Yes." She smiled broadly.

"Well, that's enough for tonight at any rate. Perhaps another couple of chapters tomorrow. It's time for you bed." And, with a shake of her finger, she admonished, "No more reading tonight."

Her feet had just fallen upon the stairs when I turned the bedside lamp back on and started in with chapter two. Several hours later I was nearly finished when I heard feet hitting the bottom steps and rushed to turn out my light, hiding the book under my pillow. If my mother knew that I wasn't asleep, I didn't notice as I lay there, trying to look at beatific and asleep as possible while willing all the grown-ups to get to bed already.

I finished the book somewhere around midnight. I know because the cuckoo clock on the mantel downstairs let out twelve mournful whistles.

What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky

About three years ago, I read Anne Leckie's Imperial Radch trilogy, followed by the entirety of Seanan McGuire's October Daye series, followed by her Wayward Children books. About halfway through this exercise, I realized that it had been some time since I'd read a female author, and that it was something I really missed. I followed this up by reading Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, during which I picked up a few other books by lady authors including, at the recommendation of Levar Burton's fantastic podcast, Lesley Nneka Arimah's "What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky."

It's a pretty short book, with 12 stories, averaging about 20 pages each, and I read it ... well, today. This Saturday. I started in the morning and finished it up as the chicken breasts I'd prepared for dinner slowly smoked in the Weber grill. One of the best compliments I can give this books is that it distracted me such that the smaller of the breasts dried out a bit, and I had to butterfly the largest of them as I didn't move them in and out of hotzones as I should have.

These aren't stories by a woman writer. These aren't stories by an African-American writer. These are stories by a woman who's an ex-pat Nigerian, and not from one of the better times in Nigeria's history. These pages bleed a particular culture, a specific period and time, and a particular set of characters. In the hands of a lesser author, 12 stories with these limitations could feel stale and unlived-in, but LNA is not a lesser author.

Her characters feel real, even when she's writing magical realism or straight-up afro-futurism. I honestly think that my favourite tale is "What Is A Volcano?", which has one human character. The rest of mythological characters, acting out a tale that resonates in a way that feels like it could've been told by grandmothers to their granddaughters for millennia.

So, what are the themes? Women and families, mostly, and especially how the latter screw-up the former. There are a lot of damaged women in these pages, and people who don't feel comfortable with stories of abuse - emotional, verbal or physical - should read this book with that in mind. I recommend this book to everyone else, though, and I do mean everyone.

Be More Kind

I unashamedly love Frank Turner. I mean, I like his music because it's amazing and sincere and driving and all the things that I want from pleasant ear-sounds, but I also love Frank Turner. Not in spite of him being an atheist and a punk, but because of those things, because what he is, is something I can learn a lot from and because those things make him sincere and open - what you hear when he talks and when he sings is what he is, and I like that.

His latest album is called "Be More Kind," the title taken from a phenomenal poem by the phenomenal Clive James. I like the album, as I've liked every previous album, and honestly the title track isn't my favourite*, but it is a great song, and has the distinction of encapsulating a thought that had been passing through my head for some time now.

This last Wednesday, June 27th, I took my son to a Frank Turner - my first concert with this artist, and my son's first concert in a club setting. It was a great night. The opening acts were amazing**, the crowd was active but not too rowdy and Frank Turner really knows how to put on a show.

And, yes, he did sing "Be More Kind." He introduced it with the admission that kindness won't actually solve the world's problems. I mean, not all of them, it will take more work and effort than just, "be more kind," but it's a place to start and perhaps the only place to start from. And I agree with that and have been posting up to Facebook, various message boards and other places examples of kindness and working in my own life to show more kindness to those around me. I don't expect massive dividends from that, but, well, it's something to do, and I've reached the conclusion lately that only doing things because they "pay off" in some giant way is another kind of bigotry.

See, I'm a Christian, and in the past year or so, that's become a statement that I have to defend. Not in the sense of defending my faith, but defending what people perceive Christians to be.

Don't try to defend this. Just don't.

"I'm a Christian, but not the kind that thinks it's cool to make fun of disabled people."

"I'm a Christian, but not the kind that thinks that abortion will stop if we just passed the right laws, but that public shootings can't be stopped by passing the right laws."

"I'm a Christian, but not the kind that enthusiastically supports the separation of families at the border because it's 'legal.'"

As the list of atrocities that my fellow believers willing associate with rises, I find myself frankly exhausted by it, but there's a distinct pattern I notice to the things that I find I have to defend myself against: they are, by default, rather passive.

Voting is a straightforward and simple process, the absolute basic minimum expected in a functioning democracy. Most anti-abortionists I know do absolutely nothing about their pet issue other than share memes on Facebook. And defending immigrants? That takes work. I know more about that than most, being an immigrant and all.

I was pondering this on the drive home as Graeme rifled through the radio stations, trying to find something he could listen to that wouldn't keep him from napping and settled on a Christian music station.

(Pause for laughter)

In total, we ended up listening to five songs, plus, of course, Oceans.*** Three of them were perfectly forgettable fluff, the sort of songs where you really could replace all of the names of God in the song with "baby" and end up with a treacly pop love song. Two of them stuck out in just how wrong they were. First, God Is On The Move by 7eventh Time Down which, first, let's pause about that name for a moment. Anyone else want to pronounce the first word there as "Seveneventh Time Down?" Anyhow, this is about things that make God move. It is, apparently anytime:

The modern Christian's protest sign.

• a heart turns from darkness to light
• temptation comes and someone stands to fight
• somebody lives to serve and not be served
• in weakness someone falls upon their knee
• [someone] dares to speak the truth that sets men free
• the choice is made to stand upon the Word

So, the first two are completely internal and passive, with nothing about how they actual impact anything other than the nameless heart/someone feeling any effect of the change. The third is utterly undefined but it, indeed active. The fourth is, again, completely internal. The last two are nebulous Christian-speak that basically mean, "telling people about God." So, not entirely passive, but not what I'd call "sharing the gospel" because, well, there's a lot more to that then just saying stuff.

" It's like, how much more evangelical
George Michael could this be? And
the answer is none. None more evangelical
George Michael.

The other song was literally just about people being unwilling to say "the truth." This truth was utterly undefined in the song, but it was clear, from the songwriter's perspective, that "the truth" was dangerous and people didn't like it.

Frankly both of these songs are worse than their bubblegum pop brethren because they're a call to passivity wrapped up in the package of a call to action. I should clarify, though, lest this be seen as my shaking my cane at the kids these days. My generation has no right to really complain about vapidity in our music. For every time Rich Mullins wrote "Hard To Get," Michael W. Smith wrote "Go West Young Man."

Which, let's talk more about songwriting and Christianity, shall we? That first song, by Seveneventh Time Down, leans heavily on the phrase, "God moves," which comes from the poetry of William Cowper, an 18th century English poet, hymnwriter, abolitionist and insane person. No, really, he was institutionalized a couple of times in life, for what we now think was bipolar disorder, and yet he wrote these poems excoriating the slave trade, and Britain's participation in it. Why does that matter? Let's go to verse four of God Moves In Mysterious Ways:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.

Do you think that an abolitionist was writing to the white members of the congregation when he wrote that? Cowper's poetry was a call to action, not a back-pat for all the awesome stuff we've already done. So, act. Be more kind. All the time, every day, as much as we can. And, yes, some times, "be more kind," is going to mean, "stay at home and eat ice cream because you're exhausted," because self-care is a thing, but be there when you can. Don't stand. Don't speak, unless you need to. Be. Do. Move.

* That would be "Don't Worry," which is a fantastic reverse advice column where the writer is basically saying, "I have no advice, other than don't worry about not knowing what to do because none of us know either."

** I'd heard of The Restorations and caught one or two tracks, but they put on a fantastic live show. The other act, a vaguely reassembled version of Dead Rosenstock, was wonderful as well, with that same brutal honesty I love in a musician. I didn't buy anything from them but a sticker, though, being somewhat low on funds.

*** An extension of Godwin's Law - as you listen to a Christian music station, the probability of hearing Oceans approaches 1.