bruce cockburn - life short call now
from a recent interview with bruce cockburn:
I grew up in a typical more-or-less liberal middle-class household where we were encouraged to pay attention to current events and be aware of what's going on in the world. But in no way were we ever encouraged to take a stand on those things-except by one teacher that I had very early on.
This stayed with me, or at least it came back to me later as a really significant moment. We used to have show-and-tell at the beginning of every class. This was about grade three, maybe grade four. And this teacher would have show-and-tell, and one day somebody came in with a newspaper clipping about student radicals in Turkey demonstrating against the United States, against NATO bases in Turkey.
And she said, "OK, what's a radical? Does anyone know what a radical is?" Of course none of us third or fourth grade kids knew what a radical was, so she proceeded to explain. It's somebody that thinks the situation as it exists is not acceptable and is willing to get out there and do what is necessary to change that. Then she said, "I hope you'll all grow up to be radicals."
That is mind-blowing when you think about it. What a gutsy woman, right? I mean, this is the 1950s. The McCarthy hearings were in full swing in the States. That's where I first heard of Pete Seeger, in the same show-and-tell, because that teacher was very, very much impressed with Pete Seeger.
I think that did make an impression. I didn't think about it at the time and not for years afterwards. But if you hold that up against the things that some people are told at that age: "Don't dare make waves, anybody that gets called a radical deserves to be exterminated." There are kids who are being told that, but I got the opposite.
the interview is for his new album, Life Short Call Now, and i just listened to Beautiful Creatures as i drafted this post, and it has the most aching chorus. bruce said in the interview:
I look around and I see this extinction going on. Most of the species being lost are ones we don't really notice, including tropical insects and stuff like that. But some of them are very noticeable: the polar bear, for instance, the tiger, these creatures that loom large in our imagination as storybook characters when we're kids as symbols of power, of divinity even. And we're killing them off. In fact, for all practical purposes, we have killed them off. It won't be long before there's nothing out there that can't survive in a zoo. And I just felt the tragedy of that so much that I wrote that song