assignment # 9 - lily gardner: folkx

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

Pete Seeger

When we sang this song at my grandpa’s funeral, I felt it in my whole body. I remember it was my first time in the front row at a funeral. Definitely not my last. I wish it was. I felt it in my whole body because that’s all I wanted to do. I imagined the man who was the boy scout troop leader until deciding it was a sexist organization, guitar on his knee, strumming away the songs of America’s favorite communist. 

Someone told me the Bible was a collection of folk tales and I haven’t been able to think about it in another way since. But isn’t that what it is? We slap titles of the same stories for Indigenous Peoples and sell them in Barnes and Nobles across the nation, where the hell is the “Classic Folktales of the Native American,” Christian edition?

I wonder if I accepted all these things maybe my life might be easier. Of course, there is a time to die and a time to be born, but what about all those people who are shot unarmed by police in the streets of their own neighborhoods, or just eating ice cream? How ever many stones we cast away and bring together and mourn and dance and cook and clean and sing and jump, it doesn’t bring them back. It doesn’t make it just, but do we have to all believe the world is an inherently just place?

I am assured they didn’t mean genoicide or terrorism when the ancient preachers sat down to write Ecclesiastes. I don’t think Pete meant Vietnam, either? We war within ourselves and between each other, but is there a point when, war is not the answer? Who does war help the most? Who does it harm the most, those disproportionately impacted?

War is the privilege of the people who can choose to fight in it, usually.