Songs, The System and So Many Questions

 

I love songs so much that all my life I have wondered how songwriters construct them. 

Do lyrics come to a songwriter first, and then afterwards comes the idea for the music? Or is it the other way around? 

Seeing the mobs’ flag on the walls of the nation’s capitol scaled by lawless weightlifters, I felt the same sort of question form in my mind. 

What came first, the hateful fear-mongering rhetoric of cable’s bargain basement screaming heads programming, or was it the policies that led to the mob’s anger: the loss of good-paying jobs in the U.S. to countries whose workers are forced to work for lower wages? 

Or, as a card-carrying Chicana lesbian, I wonder, too, if the reason includes the changing features and shades on the faces of America’s family portrait?

I wonder also which came first, corporations’ higher profits and our collective reduced support for K- 12 education and colleges  or was it unregulated social media? 

Did new media’s rush for ratings and views blind us to the power shown yesterday of media’s impact and influence over people and their behaviors? 

Disenfranchised people who drank Trump’s Jonestown Kool-Aid and took to the streets at the behest of their leader yesterday sure gave us a show. What a show. 

And I ask were the rioters admitted onto the grounds by an  intentionally under-prepared capital police force? And when they were herded out without being arrested, where did the muscle men thugs go during a curfew to celebrate their failed coup d’état? 

I know this: They got their time on camera, their moment in the spotlight,  their 15 seconds of fame, taking selfies in an elected official‘s office and on the dias  of the senate chambers. Also, I know the system worked. The legislators did their job. The system worked.

 I remind myself that is what’s important. 

As we sat watching the legislators speak for five minutes each when they finally returned to work, we were thrilled with being able to listen to them and watch them. The system at work. They were going to do the job of certifying Biden’s election.

It was magical even if they were limited to five minutes to see their passion and hear their thoughts,  their speeches without interruption from commercials or interpretation. 

I realized it had been decades since I had been able to listen to a live speech! And as I followed on Twitter there were people there complaining about the length of time taken up leading to the final vote. Our collective attention span has reduced, mine included

Yet I thrilled at watching people who I read about for years but had hardly seen on TV.  Even if I didn’t agree with them, I saw their personalities and their passion and appreciated being able to see the system work, live and unfiltered. It had been bruised and battered, true, and we have years of work ahead of us. But the system worked.