The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o'clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
about a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

The revolution will not be tweeted

“The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” – that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living, the way you move. Gil Scott-Heron

Gil Scott-Heron, a poet, jazz musician, and spoken-word artist, died Friday. His piece “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” first recorded in 1970 and often revised, has been referenced extensively in pop culture. It begins:

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

In an interview with Skip Blumberg for “The 90’s,” Scott-Heron explained the thinking behind the catchphrase:

That was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you’re living, the way you move. … The thing that’s going to change people is something that will never be captured on film. It’ll just be something you see and realize, ‘I’m on the wrong page,’ or ‘I’m on the right page but I’m on the wrong note and I’ve got to get in synch with everybody else to understand what’s happening in this country.

You do have to change your mind before you can change the way you’re living. And how do you do that? You meditate. You sit. You watch what arises in your mind. You look at it – how do you respond to the thoughts? What emotions arise? Where do they come from? Can you investigate them without acting them out? Are you your thoughts or something more?

Noah Levine, founder of Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society, often describes Buddhism as a path of personal (which leads to social) revolution. “The Buddha’s teachings are not a philosophy or a religion,” he writes in “The Heart of the Revolution: The Buddha’s radical teachings on forgiveness, compassion, and kindness. “They are a call to action, an invitation to revolution.”

When you change your thoughts, you change how you act – and react – in the world, which changes how you relate to people, which has ripples that go out beyond what you’ll ever know.

Actions have consequences. That’s the essence of karma – you reap what you sow. You cannot get the result for which you have not planted the seed.

If you sit on your couch and watch TV, surf the Internet, tweet your outermost thoughts, you will never find happiness that outlasts your deodorant. You have to put all that aside and go inside.

The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver's seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

Will you be there?

Happy birthday, Dad

Today would have been my dad’s birthday, but he died 20 years ago. Tomorrow is my birthday, and I always thought of myself as a serendipitous late birthday present. Just this year – 53 years after the fact – I found out that I was scheduled to be born that day. Still cool, I suppose.

My dear friend Mary Darby’s father died last year, and she spoke at his funeral about the lessons she learned from him that she will carry with her always. I was thinking today about what I learned from my dad. This is what I came up with.

It’s better to laugh at life than to get angry with it. My dad was a Boy Scout leader for many years. He used to come from summer camp with stories about behavior that would make a more-controlling person need a second week off just to let their blood pressure come back to normal. But my dad would laugh so hard when he told them to us that he’d have to stop and wipe the tears from his eyes. He found delight in a lot of places where it would have escaped others. On the other hand, he was an alcoholic so I got so see the suffering that results from getting angry at life and those in your life.

It’s never too late to change your ways. I had already moved out of the house before my dad connected with AA and stopped drinking. He never sat down and looked me in the eye and admitted all his wrongs and apologized, but he told me once that he had tried to make amends by changing his behavior. And he taught me that that’s the truly important thing – to walk the walk, to live by your values. I think this is my main standard for assessing people, and I can be a little harsh in applying it sometimes. Sorry, Dad. Working on that.

Dancing is a good thing. My dad liked Dixieland Jazz. I can’t say I came to share that, but I did get his total enjoyment of music. He was a large man by this point in his life, and the dining room, where our stereo was located, didn’t have much open space. He would put on the Dukes of Dixieland and jiggle so hard that the change came out of his pockets. In fact, he had encased the stereo speakers in cement to allow for such vibrations. Or maybe for some other reasons. Sometimes my daughter and I dance around the kitchen. It’s like that. I also remember dancing with him at a cousin’s wedding when I was in my early teens. It was formal thing, where he led and I stumbled. He was so strong and assured and good at the steps that it didn’t feel weird to be doing old people’s dancing with him.

Read a lot. Especially mysteries. We used to go to the library together every Tuesday. I went through every historical novel in the children’s section (“Little Maid of” enter the name of a Revolutionary or Civil War battle, and you can learn how a 10-year-old girl actually saved the day.) He read mysteries. When I was around 12, I was sick and couldn’t go. I’d just started moving over to the adult stacks. He brought me a mystery by George Simeon that involved a home for unwed mothers. I was somewhat baffled by the choice, but he wasn’t one for unspoken messages so I didn’t look too hard. I was hooked. I think he would have found the Scandinavians a bit dark, but he’d love some of the women PIs.

Don’t smoke. Smoking was the only thing he ever told me not to do. He said, in fact, “If I catch you smoking, I’ll smack you,” which is something he never did. Wish he’d taken that advice.

Happy Mother's day ... when the kids aren't alright

There's only seven shopping days left til Mother's Day -- less if, like me, mother lives far away and you can't stop off at a florist's on your way to take her to brunch. If, like me, you've used FTD, the national network of florists, in the past, you're getting daily emailed reminders (and discount offers).

The traditional Buddhist advice is to regard all beings as your mother because, in some life over all the eons, they have been. This, in eastern wisdom, would cause you to treat them with respect and kindness.

Not always so these days. The mother and child reunion is often fraught with tension. But it is also rich in opportunities to practice, to be with joy and sadness at their most intense..

When your kid is hurting – after you’ve cleaned up the blood, wiped the tears, handed over an ice pack, given hugs, given discipline – you come, sooner or later, to the question, is this my fault?

The answer may come quickly: Yes, all of it, or no, none of it.

But that answer is habit. And if you wait, if you watch, you’ll likely discover that the truth is somewhere in the middle.

It’s easy, maybe natural, to want to take it all on yourself. The kid, if biological, has your genetic material, mixed with a partner’s. The kid has grown up with you, absorbing information you didn’t know you were conveying.

And the kid may be more than happy to hand it over -- “if you hadn’t done x, then I wouldn’t have done y,” -- down to the very basic level of “I didn’t ask to be born.” You made that happen. The kid is a part of your karma, and you are a part of hers.

But there are other causes and conditions at play. To take all the blame – or none of it – is to make it about you. And this is not about you.

Stories are no help here, not the ones you read at bedtime, not the ones that shape how you see yourself or how you see him. They may provide familiarity, and that may be comfortable, but that does not change what is happening now. And here, for real, is when being in the present moment, seeing the person in front of you, and sorting out what is happening NOW -- while dropping the stories about what happened when she was 5 or who you thought he would be at 17 -- is what can transform the situation.

Every minute is mindfulness, is awareness, is stepping out of the stream of consciousness and watching the hopes and fears and memories flow by without floating away on them.

What our wounded places most want, John Welwood writes, is for us to be there with them. Welwood is a Buddhist and psychologist who's talking about traumatic experiences that have kept our inner children -- and the adults they become -- locked in samsaric patterns.

But it's true too for our outer children, the ones we gave life to. Sometimes, what they most want and need is a safe place to be sad, to be angry, to be lonely, to be confused. And to know, because you're there with them and you're not running away, that they are OK even if they don't feel that way.

And if you can be there with them and their feelings, holding space, then wisdom may arise and you can act from that instead of acting out old storylines.

To get to the wisdom, you have to marinate first in metta. For yourself, because you deserve kindness as much as anyone. For your child: may you be safe; may you be happy; may you be healthy; may you find ease. Even if you can’t imagine how that will look. You let go of imagining. And then, because everyone is someone’s child, you invite the world into your tender, raw heart, fervently wishing that everyone finds happiness and health, safety, and ease.

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Kindness
by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
it is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Excuse me -- I'm a cabbage today

The Art of Disappearing by Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say
We should get together
say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees.
The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

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Monday Monday

Cheering up is a strange thing, and hard to do. We usually think we'll cheer up once things get better for ourselves or better in the world. But that's backwards. What really works is cheering up FIRST, before there's a clear reason to. Then things start to feel more fluid, you can deal with what comes and help things get better in the world. Cheering up is how things get better. And if you can cheer up for no reason on a Monday, you're going probably to have a whole week that benefits others. -- Ethan Nichtern

Tina Fey, the boy with the pink nail polish, and gender constructs

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On the cover of her new book, Tina Fey’s intelligent elf face rests in a large masculine hand at the end of a beefy Teamster arm. It’s a wakeup moment, a doubletake – what’s not right with this picture? Fey does that a lot in her work on “30 Rock,” where she holds stereotypes up to show how insubstantial they are, then turns the light on the character who questions the stereotype, revealing the concepts and constructs under THAT view.
That’s what I work on a lot in meditation, deconstructing the assumptions and the roles that I think make me “me.” Who can’t take sitting in the posture anymore? Who can’t accept karma? Who wants to question the teacher – the good student, the defiant one, the person who feels defensive and stupid because she doesn’t understand, the one who wants affirmation, the one who really and truly wants to know in order in try out the concept.
On the first page of my current journal, started as I began an intense, week-long, silent retreat, I wrote, who am I without my roles? Eight months later, I still wonder.
Some roles are easy to discard – wife, mom, for example – because they’re social constructs. “Spouse” and “parent” lie on a deeper level because they have to do with connections with people I care about.
One of the most basic identities, it seems to me, is sex/gender. If you ask someone what they are, you can strip off the social roles fairly quickly and even the ethnic or class definitions. For most people, stripping off the man/woman label is a challenge.
The New York Times this week had an article about a New Jersey court that’s faced with defining what a man is. El'Jai Devoureau was fired from his job watching men pee into cups for drug testing after his employer learned he had been born a woman. Mr. Devoureau, 39, says he has identified himself as a man all his life, has had sex change surgery, and has a new
birth certificate that identifies him as male, as his New Jersey driver’s license does. The Social
Security Administration made the change in its records. He's challenging his firing in court.
You could say it’s a matter of equipment, and that determining whether someone is a man or woman is pretty easy. Just look. But that’s sex; gender is something else – it has more to do with your internal self than your physical equipment. And gender can be flexible.
This is a true story:
A cisman (male sex, male identified – not that there’s anything wrong with that) whose car was stuck in a snow bank in a quaint New England town that had seen way too much snow this winter walks over to a nearby house and knocks on the door. When someone answers he explains his situation and asks: “Are there a couple of males who could help me push it out?”
The inhabitants of the house include a transfem, a gender queer, and an assortment of others, some with male parts, some with female ones, but you couldn’t tell which by looking at the selves they show the world. So who goes to help him push the car? One lesbian with a chip on her shoulder, ready to prove that gender has nothing to do with strength.
It’s second nature to invoke gender roles, even for people who are mindful in most aspects of life. I’ve been in conversation with a man when another man comes over and asks him for help moving something. I’m tempted to point out that I lift weights three times a week, that I’m taller and maybe heavier than the male they’ve asked for help, and that moving cushions and sweeping the floor is a task not tied to gender. Instead I just ask if I can see if I can be of any help and pitch in.
I don’t react with anger. I would have, once upon a time. I react now with curiosity: What is it about this task that requires a male? What do you mean by male? Does pushing the car require a penis? What if the person with a penis is dressed as a woman? Can women be strong? If I’m strong, am I less womanly?
Social commentators are all up in arms this week about a J Crew ad featuring resident and creative director Jenna Lyons and her son who's wearing pink Essie nail polish on his toenails.“Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink," the ad copy reads. Conservative commentators say she should be putting money aside for therapy because he’ll need it to address his subsequent gender confusion.
To paraphrase Sylvia Boorstein, everybody’s confused about something. As Buddhists, we work to clear away the confusion, the labels, the constructs, the things that define us and make us seem solid, and see the clarity and inherent goodness that’s present in everyone and everything. From an absolute view, we are all genders and none.
The question is, how does that manifest in the physical world?




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