The Merry Minuet: Coming up on the Fourth of July

When I landed a "management job" as a very young adult (1950's)I felt magnanimous enough to buy my parents a Magnavox record player for Christmas! It was a starkly "modern" rectangular prism of brown painted wood and formica with an empty place into which one could insert an am/fm radio if one could afford it.

We could play 78's, 45's (if we used the little insert) and the new lp's on this machine, and we did with gusto. Classical, popular, folk, Uncle Remus stories, "Bert &Me", and Viennese Waltzes that my father especially loved.

One musical item keeps coming back in memory, somehow accompanied by the smell of hot laminate that the mechanics of our phonograph used to emit: The Kingston Trio singing various gems, including Tom Dooley, Wimoweh, They Call the Wind Maria, and such.

But there's one eerily cheerful song that is indelibly seared on my memory. I quote from web info on this song:
"Titled the Merry Little Minuet, it came straight from the "Hungry i" café in San Francisco, a "mecca" of folk music in the late 1950's. Performed by the Kingston Trio, it was song-writer Sheldon Harnick's tribute to the troubles and tensions of the world a half century past:

They're rioting in Africa, they're starving in Spain,
There's hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain

This whole world is festering with unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much

But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud
For Man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud
And we can be certain that some lovely day
Someone will set the spark off…and we will all be blown away

They're rioting in Africa, There's strife in Iran
What Nature doesn't do to us will be done by our Fellow Man"

Some things never change, except maybe the nationalities of the factions! Can't everyone just get along?

It seems to me it takes extraordinary courage and determination to "get along." Call it original sin or sibling rivalry or prophetic inevitability -- whatever you call it, something inevitably afflicts mortal, vulnerable, imperfect, struggling humans that gets us fighting with each other.

My Quaker roots tell me that digging your heels in and refusing to fight is one way to solve this mess. Supposedly the warring factions will eventually become ashamed of the carnage they are causing and withdraw.

My sense of justice tells me that addressing the issue with consequences is the answer. Supposedly the erring party will be afraid to cross the line in the sand and everyone will take their guns and go home.

My experience tells me that any hope of maneuvering through this dilemma will require a delicate balance of men and precepts; it will require unsinkable determination. Will people of integrity please stand up? And will we please look back on the very best we have found of precepts of fairness and make them our working parameters?

Fourth of July is upon us again. My female doggie will hide herself as deep in her crate as possible to try to escape the frightening noise. It won't help. The poor little thing will pant and suffer. I will put on the TV loud so she can't hear the booms so well. She can listen instead to comforting voices announcing the current business of car bombings in Glasgow.

Burst of July Color copyrighted SGH 2006
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