High Standing Zeroes

I am not much of a religious person but have always been very spiritual. Though my ideas have changed much over the years, there are some fundamental beliefs that have always been solidly true for me.

One such belief is that it's the little things in life that make up the big things and not the other way around. There are many big and important people with their expensive things but who made them big and important? It's the little people. The people with less. The people who go unnoticed. The zeroes of society.

Without these people the big people are nothing.

This is a common theme found in many religions, though I have found that many religious people do not practice this little detail. There are many of those who are more inclined to step on those smaller than themselves in society in order to reap the riches of wealth and fame. We all know people like this so we won't focus on them.

Who we will focus on are people who understand the value of appreciating and loving the zeroes of society; people who live their lives making the first last and the last first. Those who are wonderful because they themselves are zeroes who bring others up.

These are people who feel rich when the zeroes are singing for them.

Peace Bows Without Arrows

My blog about 80s music describes, in small snippets of posts, a large part of who I am. Who I am has a lot to do with those who have influenced me over the years. One such person is Buffy Sainte Marie, which puts me in a bit of a dilemma. You see, I have been wanting, for some time now, to include her in my blog but, to the best of my knowledge, she did not release any new music in the 80s.

But I got around that.

Buffy, in a large way, helped shape me in my childhood, instilling social values that I carried with me through my teen years through the 80s, allowing me to pass them on to my own children in my adulthood today. Did her influence relate to some of the music I listened to as a child of the 80s? You bet it did.

Buffy Sainte Marie is a Canadian Cree folksinger/songwriter who has always taken a strong stand for social justice and peace for all.

When I was very little, all that I knew about "Indians" was what I saw in old westerns on TV. This meant that Indians, to me, were hard-faced meanies who never smiled and mindlessly shot good people dead with arrows.

Then, one day in 1976, a pretty lady appeared on Sesame Street and called herself an "Indian." She smiled frequently and talked about feelings and getting along. I was skeptical of her being a real Indian. When she brought out her bow, my heart sunk down into my Hush Puppies. Now I knew she was a real Indian because she had a bow. I feared she would use to shoot arrows at my beloved Sesame Street family.

Instead of being a hard-faced meanie, though, she put the end of the bow in her mouth and made... a twanging noise. And she sang with the bow in her mouth while making the twanging noise. Being only 4, I didn't recognize the twanging as music, but I did understand that it wasn't threatening and that Big Bird was not about to be some big Indian dinner.

That was my first bit of understanding that movies do not always portray real life, mean people on TV sometimes aren't always mean, some people who come from strange and different backgrounds can be wonderful, and we all share many of the same feelings and experiences of life, regardless of the hue of one's skin.

For the next five years, this pretty lady took me on a journey of learning empathy for the next person and looking for ways to remove hurt feelings. Then, in 1981, she left the show and let go of my PBS-educated hand to leave the spotlight for a decade. But I was okay with that. She left me keeping an ear open for songs dealing with equality, peace, and awareness of human injustice. Such songs that covered these topics include "People Are People" by Depeche Mode, "True Colors" by Cindy Lauper, "Don't Need A Gun" by Billy Idol, and "We Are The World" by USA For Africa.

Although Buffy was out of sight for a while, she was not idle. Among her social activism and caring for her son, she co-wrote music. One of her most popular pieces was "Up Where We Belong" sung my Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes in 1982, graced with Buffy's native Cree images of nature and spirituality combined.

In 1996, Buffy released an album with the same name. I am unsure at what point in time this version was recorded, but it carries an essence of who I have always been.

Repeated Blahs... Except For That One

Much of my experience with 1987 was that there was a lot of music that all the popular radio stations played repeatedly until your ears bled but, for the life of me, the appeal for them did not resonate with me. Much of it I hated. Most of it I would not have minded much and probably would have enjoyed on a certain level if the radio stations and music video programs didn't slather it on like wall paper that posted the lyrics to "This Is The Song That Never Ends."

My 8th grade math teacher allowed us to listen to music while we worked. He had a radio tuned to a popular station, which I would have enjoyed more if that station did not play the same handful of mildly good to semi-hideous songs day after day; sometimes a song or two would be played twice within the hour. But, naturally, there were exceptions. There always are.

But there was one song that I did not mind the repeated plays. It was beautiful, sad, romantic, and sounded very different from the other songs. "Don't Dream It's Over" by Crowded House hit the US charts that year, enabling me to sit through my math class without throwing my math teacher's radio out the stupid window. I would gaze at the cute boy sitting in front of me and zone into my own world, dreaming all a blessed-well wanted to. Sometimes, all it takes is a song to make things all right again.