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Into THEBLUEbluE #1 Catherine L. Johnson 2022
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29 September 2022
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Please click on link: Richie Havens / FREEDOM – beautiful
https://youtu.be/rynxqdNMry4
“Richie Havens used his music to convey messages of brotherhood and personal freedom. Cutting his teeth on the fertile ’60s music scene of Greenwich Village and interpreting tunes by Bob Dylan, he gained even more notoriety after opening the Woodstock festival on August 15, 1969.
The festival was off to a shaky start—several hours after the scheduled kickoff time, not a note of music had been played. Organizers convinced Havens to go on stage alone with his guitar and entertain the hundreds of thousands waiting for the music to begin. Each time he tried to finish his set, he found himself being talked into going back out. But after two hours and 45 minutes of playing, Havens ran out of material.
So he improvised.
Over the intensely rhythmic strum of his own acoustic, Havens composed a festival-inspired song called “Freedom” on the spot (building on a snatch of the traditional “Motherless Child”). The tune was immortalized in the Woodstock film, and Havens has been performing it ever since. “I feel that it doesn’t belong to me anyway,” he said in 2002. “It belongs to everything that made it come out.”
The accomplishment Havens was most proud of, however, was co-founding the award-winning, multi-cultural, children-run organization called the National Guard. With chapters across the country, it teaches kids to take charge of their own communities, assesses local ecological needs and provides hands-on participation. When asked how we can become more engaged, Havens told us, “Start on a local level. What’s wrong in your own community? What can be repaired and improved? Solving problems on a local level first can lead to a national network of growth and change.”
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SHOW
improvisational HUMANITY
in crisis
ACTIONS not thoughts
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Please read
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/29/desantis-florida-hurricane-ian-biden/
‘A liberal is a conservative who has been mugged by hardship’
…Some might be tempted to stick it to the Florida governor, who has abused his power when it comes to asylum seekers, LGBTQ youths and pregnant women. Why help him when he has no interest in helping vulnerable people? But we do not do that in this country.
Similarly, after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky decried federal pandemic aid to states as “blue state bailouts,” some might have wanted to tell Kentuckians, whose state receives more money from the federal government than it pays in taxes, that they’re on their own in cleaning up the wreckage from powerful tornadoes that swept the state last year. But again, that’s not how America operates
‘misery can be humbling’
Pine Tree: 
TAKETHECROWN:usCONSTITUTION Catherine L. Johnson 2021
CATHERINE L. JOHNSON 