Pete Seeger – The American Soul
This week, The Atlantic published an article called “Pete Seeger and the American Soul.” I haven’t read it yet so I don’t know its content. But for quite a while I have had the idea of “Pete Seeger – The American Soul.” The difference in the two titles is that the former indicates a distinction between Pete and the American soul while the latter suggests that the two are one and the same.
To me, America is much more than just a geographical location or even a collection of people. It is an ideal, a challenge to this nation’s citizenry and to the world to be the best we each and collectively can be. It is a belief that to the extent people can live in harmony with their neighbors and the environment as industrious contributors to society they should be allowed to live freely, to explore and express their unique individuality. In other words, if we are all good citizens we should be allowed to pursue our dreams – to walk the paths of our calling and live the life styles that best suit us. This is what I have always believed was meant by the “American dream” and “the pursuit of happiness.” Equating the two with making money or owning things seems like a sick perversion of this lofty ideal. Our nation today may be living only a dim reflection of this ideal, but the ideal still lives on.
Gandhi implored us to “be the change you wish to see in this world” – not just think about or believe in change; not just advocate or vote for change; but rather to live it, embody it, become the incarnation of it, to actually BE the change. In that spirit, Pete WAS the ideal of America. For Pete did so much more than just believe in the ideal or advocate or sing about it. Pete lived it. Pete embodied it. Pete was the American dream incarnate.
There has been so much said about how great an activist or how great a musician Pete was. He certainly was those. But I see Pete more as a magnanimous citizen of the world who happened to be a musician and who, because he was true to the love in his heart for humanity and diversity, had no choice but to be an activist. If Pete ever looked for trouble he was wasting energy doing so. Trouble could always easily find him because those who live by the perverted vision that America is about power or money or conquest find that a man who lives by the dictates of human decency is in the way of their pursuit to attain more. A man who loves God’s creation enough to believe that we ought to clean up the Hudson River is a thorn in the greedy paws of those who would rape and pollute it for personal gain. A man who would equally share song and community with any group of people regardless of their politics, the color of their skin, the language they speak or the shape of their eyes is a danger to those who feel they are right and everybody else is wrong.
Many people say Pete was a courageous man. He certainly was. But I see him more as a man who acted so according to his sense of justice and truth that had he little room to consider how his actions might help or hinder him. The issue of courage was transcended by his orientation toward doing the right thing. Pete wasn’t motivated by whether he would gain or lose from doing what was right. Instead, he gave careful consideration to how each decision he made added to or subtracted from the welfare of his neighbors and of human society.
Pete understood that to have justice – legal, civil, racial, economic, environmental – we need to change the way we think and act, and change some of our laws. The way to do this is to build a new culture – or actually, to revive a culture that existed long ago when people knew how to live with the land and make decisions by consensus. The culture can be built and the community that adopts it can be nurtured by people gathering to share work, eat food, sing songs and conduct the business of the day. The Beacon Sloop Club is a model of this method that demonstrates the amazing accomplishments that can be achieved by small groups of determined individuals.
I have heard many people describe Pete as an atheist. But over the years I have come to realize that Pete possessed a deep reverence for those qualities that are attributed to God – goodness, respect, willingness to work hard and share and help others, being a good steward of the earth, treating people fairly. I don’t know if he believed in any of the various man-made definitions of what “God” is. But I have heard it said that to love God, one must start by loving God’s creation, God’s creatures and God’s attributes. If this is true, then perhaps Pete was closer to God than most other people I know.
I have always believed that a deep reverence for these very same qualities plus the right of each worthy citizen to be free to pursue his or her calling is at the heart of what “America” stands for. If this is true, how can we think of a Pete as anything but the human incarnation of the American soul itself?
