“Just What in the Hell Has Gone Wrong Here Anyhow?” We would all like to know the answer to Woody Guthrie’s question. The question was answered long ago in Matthew 25:31-46: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Jesus’ insight was that we should all do our best to find a way to treat our neighbors and “Mother Nature” with compassion.
As a wandering minstrel Woody Guthrie lived the answer to his own question. “[I] sung along the boweries of forty-two states; Reno Avenue in Oklahoma City, Lower Pike Street in Seattle, the jury table in Santa Fe; the Hooversvilles on the flea-bit rims of your city’s garbage dump. I sung in the camps called ‘Little Mexico,’ on the dirty edge of California’s green pastures. I sung on the gravel barges of the East Coast and along New York’s Bowery watching the cops chase bay-rum drinkers. I curved along the bend of the Gulf of Mexico and sung with the tars and salts in Port Arthur, the oilers and greasers of Texas City, the marijuana smokers in the flop town in Houston. I trailed the fairs and rodeos all over Northern California, Grass Valley, Nevada City; I trailed the apricots and peaches around Marysville … everywhere I went I throwed my hat down in the floor and sung for my tips.”[i]
Walt Whitman, in his 1855 poem I Sing the Body Electric, also “sings” the solution to the human misery that Guthrie refused to let America sweep under the rug. “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or numbers of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families … dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”[ii]
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Supplemental Reading: Creation, The ABC’s of Simple Reality, Vol 1
#42 Go Freely
[i] Turner, Frederick. “Just What in the Hell Has Gone Wrong Here Anyhow?” American Heritage October 1977, p. 36.
[ii] Ibid., p. 39.
