Mississippi River Suite, Part IV (video)

Here is Mississippi River Suite, Part IV (of 5). I’m writing this on Memorial Day 2020, in the heart of the pandemic, in Chicago Illinois—the center of the country. When this was first conceived the premise was quite simple that I would use the river that “divides the nation’ as the centerpiece for a musical work about a ‘divided nation.’

It takes my breath away to think that in this short span of the past few years, the climate-change waters have risen all around and the divided nation has become more divided and divisive. And so what do we do about it? Ever since I lost religion as a useful floatation device, the Golden Rule has been the north star, and we can follow that right to the voting booth to bring in the ‘good’ and take out the ‘bad.’ Of course America will never agree about which is which. Our strength here is that we get to disagree out loud in the perpetual hunt for a more perfect union.

Part IV lands in the mud. “There’s no dance anymore.” But there is a whisper of possibility, and hope. There’s always some trail of hope to be found if you look hard enough. Ghandi and Mandela were masters of hope, and an inspiration for us all. But Memorial Day reminds us with the thundering repetition of white gravestone rows at Arlington Cemetery, that there are consequences—and the consequences are severe. So we return to the notion that “it’s all up to you, on the other side of the river, wherever that might be.”