8-24-13 RMB Imagine

8-24-13 RMB Imagine

Dear Rita Mae Brown,

Today was a Saturday with three boys who can’t get along to save their lives. It’s like watching a microcosm of worldwide conflict. One must dominate, one must argue, one either mediates or adds fuel to the fire. And then it alternates. Another one must dominate and they all rotate positions. Until they find themselves where they began and the cycle begins anew.

No amount of counseling puts an end to the struggle, because when all is said and done, they are who they are. And today they are three boys that can’t get along, period.

I look at them and wonder if we are not much better than they are. In their youth they display a level of maturity that we have managed to perfect in our multi-millennia of adult years…where one nation must dominate, another argues and several others mediate or add fuel to the fire.

It exists on every level, in every neighborhood.

“Share your toys and games” I preach.

Yet don’t we all lock our doors with our gems tucked away inside for safekeeping?

Imagine the chaos we would have if we shared everything, if none were any hungrier than another, if everyone had something so that no person was left wanting?

I was too young to be a Beatles fan in the midst of the craze and didn’t really take a liking to them in the years that followed. Why bring this up now in the middle of a letter about world conflict and domination? Hold on, there is a point to this.

I listen to a lot of Spanish, oops excuse me, Latino radio (Is there a difference? Spanish/Latino? potatoe/potahtoe?). I take note of songs I like and go buy the CD. I liked a song by the two singers “Jesse y Joy”, so I now I sit listening to other songs by them, all in Spanish…except one.

The last song on the CD is John Lennon’s Imagine, written over four decades ago in 1971, as sung by Jesse and Joy in English. His words mean more to me now than they ever did before, as I sit listening to three boys argue, the news discussing a world in conflict and I attempt to see a better way, a kinder humankind…. Imagine.

From here to there,

Loraine