You know what bugs me every single day and says to me that nobody is really at the wheel?
The dog sh☆t lie that musicians are non essential. Not essential to what?
Art is what keeps people alive.
It’s essentially suicide prevention.
People don’t want to admit it, and some people don’t know it, but they are dying. They are dying from social distancing.
Social distancing… and the dog sh☆t lie about what is essential to the State rather than the individual is a fever,
…and a fever is a game of Chicken. The body raises its temperature to kill the infection but often times the fever kills the patient.
It’s you or the contagion. It’s your culture vs. the plague.
For all you that want to split hairs, there were plagues before people knew what bacteria was, this a plague in the biblical and Greco Roman sense.
In Latin they say Plaga.
Welcome to your very first plague. It’s not the Measles. The Roman’s faced the Measles and when you have the measles you infect 30 people. Imagine that in a mosh pit.
You have to shut down sporting events, church functions, concerts, community gatherings for a certain amount of time to slow a pandemic. The Romans knew that and when they did so they said it was something that was known in the world they called antiquity.
But you actually have to sacrifice the essential jobs and services and rely on the services of survival.
Call them survival services. If your job doesn’t sound as essential when it is considered amongst the criterion of survival, well..maybe it’s essential to some political equation.
We are bringing our culture’s temperature up to a fever by shutting down the extremities that are essential to our survival in the long run. In the short run, we need groceries.
But the fever is rising. If the plan is the incrementally keep increasing our containment and the legal consequences this country and economic system is not built for that.
But we have seen that we are built for narcing on our neighbor like it’s The Spanish Inquisition and The French Revolution. Govenor Inslee had to literally plead for Washingtonians to stop narcing on each other for breaking shelter in place.
He explained that our phones Narc on us quite enough as we are past all that talk of freedom as it relates to privacy.
But we’ve done it all wrong long before this. We’ve been sheltering in place with our smart phones for about a decade.
The reason we don’t know our neighbor and didn’t question if performance art was not an essential service is because of how dead inside we are as Nation.
Across Europe there are concerts where entire towns gather and drink for days and listen to music. And it’s free.
We are already bankrupt. We thought the Stock Market was the way to guage the life of our society, not the services we deem so essential we must invest in preserving them and bringing them back and soon as possible.
Art is what keeps each of us from crumbling, and I have seen many of us crumble before my eyes and I have seen others rise from near death because of it.
In my glossary: short term essential vs long term essential. A better society would invest in making sure artists and cultural events are fully funded and sponsored when this viral smoke clears.
Because what is the point of surviving a fever and then going right back out into the cold?
These nurses should be given plus one free tickets to any show they want. The cashiers should be able to go into guitar center and grab an instrument. Because ,if we burn out this new sector of so called first responders, we’re going to be even closer to cultural death the next time…or rather next round.
Art is suffering. If you want to see how dead we are inside even as we try to put on a happy face watch the latest episode of SNL tonight as they tried to put together a show from their bedrooms and Tom Hanks’ kitchen.
It was awful. It was like watching us all trying to put on shows on our own through our phones.
If it wasn’t a thing before this, just because we need it doesn’t mean it’s a thing right now.
We need shows. Live shows, audiences, and people breathing together in a room at near capacity. It’s energy we lack right now that we will die without.
It’s another first down. It’s a hug from your Mom, it’s a first date, it’s a bass player leaning into a drummer with a bass face less than six feet away.
It’s not this sh☆t. This is essentially slowly dying to make quick work of a virus. And it may all be a complete waste of time.
But A minus effort. But Trump however gets an F.
His briefings are less than essential. They are a threat.
– Musician and writer Davin Michael Stedman has many ventures, such as the AMAZING blog, 100milesofmusic.com. Davin’s recent song has become a global earworm and Caribbean dancehall hit. Listen here on Reggaeville: DAVIN MICHAEL STEDMAN & ANTHONY RED ROSE – FREE YOUR MIND FEAT. SLY & ROBBIE WITH LENKY MARSDEN. The video is now available on Youtube: Tuff Gong Television. His single with British band Sherlock Soul is available here.
