Shower the people you love with love...

Driving to work this morning, I was scanning around the dial and got to WBCN, to the Howard Stern Show... I don't normally listen, but...

There was an interesting echo to the quality of Howard's voice and I could tell it was the end of the segment, but they were getting ready to play something special. It sounded like something that was recorded live on a soundstage. I recognized the second in studio voice immediately as James Taylor's, and he and Stern were setting up the song JT was going to play, as JT strummed a few notes.

He then launches into a sweet guitar intro, immediately recognizable by the chords as the opening of "Shower the People." He sings it with such sweet earnestness. He changed some of the lyrics, saying "things are going to work our righteous if we only will..." in the refrain.

I think he was angling at some sort of political statement, refering to the squeaky wheel as "he's alway's getting his grease..." which may be pointed at someone who may be... George W. Bush (my guess, not sure of the context of when the recording was made...). Regardless of his political stance, hearing him call out to everyone to "Shower the people you love with love, show them the way that you feel. Things are gonna be much better if we only will..." just made me start crying my heart out.

I think he, JT, may be of the mindseat that the "people we love" are the folks who blew up the WTC and the Pentagon, and that we should shower them with love and peace instead of missles and liquid fire. Perhaps turning to what is basically a true Christ-like stance toward the attackers. I'm not sure I think we can or should do that, but taking the context of what I normally held as just a normal schmaltzy 70's love ballad and making it a call for global peace and forgiveness dopeslapped me hard on the way in today.

JT is a well known limousine liberal, as more-enlightened-than-the-unwashed-masses rich people types who believe in giving everyone's money away normally are. I'm not sure I fully agree with a truly passive act of diplomacy in this context, because terroristic behavior isn't going to stop no matter how many open conversations and round table discussions or diplomatic summits we have with the Taliban or any other fringe hate-group. It's just not going to stop, we can possibly slow it down by a military strike, but it will never go away.

But you know how music impacts me. So much music lately has changed meaning for me.

So I'm listening to JT. I am showering the people I love with love right here. I am examining my behavior with my kids, my co-workers, my friends. I am trying to not let other people and their hate stop me from turning to others around me and just letting them know I love them. I'm going to be more helpful.

Shower the people.

---

I spent the morning in a 2 hour long meeting. Wolfed down a lunch. Went to another meeting. Came back to finish this entry... and prior to doing that, I looked at the Boston Globe. Big mistake.

They have published a series of online photo galleries, and the most recent is of refugees who are trying to escape Afghanistan.

There is a picture of two little kids in a cart, one is a sleeping infant, the other a small child, probably 2 years old, who is crying. And they are in the cart on a road on their way to hopefully get to the Peshawar in Pakistan.Their mother or father is probably begging somewhere off camera.

Their bodies are so cute and brown, and they are so small. The one crying probably has just been punished for trying to get out of the cart, or he's hungry, hurt... I'm having a hard time imagining that in a few days these kids and a score of others could very well be casualties.

As awful as it is that what the terrorists have done to us in NYC and Washington, I can't help but have a small part of me that wants the killing to stop.

To just fucking stop already. Can't there be some other option? God, would you please tell me?!

I want the cells of terror broken up. I want Osama Bin Laden and all his worms brought down. I want justice for the thousands of murdered people who just wanted to make a living but just didn't fit in with what the world view of an Islamic fundamentalist is.

But I know that if there is an out and out war, a full force, hard-core military strike, I know full well what these men do.

These "heros," the brave men of Allah, just hide behind children just like these kids. They cower behind a curtain of civilians, and then point the finger of blame at us when we come after them, saying we are murderers of their women and children. It's far different than what we try to do, and what 'normal' cultures try to do in hiding the kids, protecting the children... and it is something I just can't grab hold of in my mind.

This picture honestly sends me into convulsions when I look at it.

I want to grab these kids from the street. I want to put them in clean clothes and show them Veggie Tales and Toy Story 1 and 2. Let them know they are safe. To get them out of the cycle of violence, out from under the wretched jurisdiction of the Taliban, a government that twists its religious founding of Islam into something that is a total bastardisation of what that religion really IS. Shower the people...

I want them to have true freedom to grow up and be sassy and goofy, to just have the freedom to grow up. That's all.

Instead I have to keep pretending in my mind I never saw them. It's the only thing I can do. Because I know what's coming. I know what is coming. But I honestly hate knowing it.

For as upset as we were as a nation that Timothy McVeigh viewed the children who died in the Murragh Building as "collateral damage," how can we honestly feel comfortable knowing that kids like this are going to also end up as "collateral damage" in a military strike against Afghanistan.

Someone please. Shower the people, the children, with something other than death from above.