If You Don't Like the Femmes...Just Walk Away

I have had an AMAZING weekend!  I got the opportunity to go see the Violent Femmes in Cincinnati at the Riverbend Music Center.  I have been a fan since high school...which was about a year or two or twenty-five ago.  I danced and sang, screamed and threw my hands up in the air.  I put on quite a show for audience members sitting around me.  After the concert, a man sitting across the aisle actually came over to me and shook my hand, "I just want you to know I admired your energy." After he walked away, I asked my husband, "Did I make an ass of myself?"  He assures me that I didn't and that he would tell me if I did.  Actually I believe he would have gotten great pleasure from telling me that I acted like an idiot.  The incident did give us a new code to use.  Whenever one of us is being an ass we now say, "You sure are energetic today."  It's perfect!  I can call Mike an asshole in front of the kids and they have NO idea! Brilliance in the making there folks!

One of my favorite parts of the concert was when the band played a song that they had not performed in a long time.  They felt that given the recent tragedy in Charleston, SC, it would be fitting to perform.  The song is entitled "No Killing" and the words were perfect for the situation.  Listen below if you are unfamiliar.

I love how the song has no political stance, no complicated solutions, "The world is starved for love."  Simple.  I love the simplicity of that statement.  There is so much truth behind that. I have been reading the articles and the political rants about the Charleston tragedy.  Gun control, mental health and the lack of programs, etc., etc., everybody is weighing in.  But what it really boils down to...is hate.  As a society, we want to believe that we are all healed from the racism of the past.  We want to believe that prejudice is dead.  But we all know, that is a lie.  I still hear the whispers in the white community about other ethnic groups. Just because you're whispering it people does not make it nonexistent.  Police brutality, hate crimes, the justice system, neighborhood investment programs, all point to the chasm between the black culture and white culture. Are all white people racist?  No.  Are all cops racist and brutal? No. But our culture as a whole has got to admit that there is still an open wound of racial divide in this country.  Dylann Roof is not mentally ill.  Dylann Roof is full of hate.  Hate toward a race of people that he wants to punish for the color of their skin.  Even the judge opened up his bond hearing with a quick acknowledgement of the nine victims murdered by this young man and pointed out that Dylann's family are victims as well. Really??  I have long said that I feel empathy toward the families of people who do unspeakable crimes, I truly do.  But would that have been pointed out had the church been predominantly white and Dylann Roof had been a black man. Interesting to consider.  Kalief Browder sat in jail for three years without a trial, ultimately leading to his suicide.  Some say its the extreme backlog of the court system, but I can't help but consider that it happened to a young...black...man.  We want to make excuses.  We want to deny the obvious when it is placed right in front of our face.  Facts are facts...it is what it is. Racism.

I do not have a solution.  Would more gun control be the answer?  Aren't drugs illegal, but people can always find them. Better mental health?  Mental health programs cannot treat hate.  Maybe the Violent Femmes know the answer.  Maybe, the world IS starved for love.