... is in production; I lack one session with Greg to get a second rhythm guitar track and a second vocal take with either Greg and Sonny (preferred) or Greg and me. Then I will launch it at this website so that those of you who are going to The Peace Alliance conference will be able to learn it. I sure would love to hear it sung live by a crowd at that rally on the White House lawn the morning of September 12!

It's a neo-patriotic song that reminds us that our nation and flag belong to all of us. It promotes the values of loyalty, peace, and community, and it ends with a call to activism. It was inspired by an exchange between our Webmaster and me about this blue-state-red-state business. I kept getting it mixed up because 35 years ago, if you were "red," that meant you were a traitor (communist). He sent me to a website where election '04 results are shown by county instead of by state. Not only that, but red and blue are reserved for counties that had been virtually 100% for one or the other candidate while counties that had been more like 50/50 are in purple and counties that had been heavily for one or the other candidate are reddish purple or bluish purple. I concluded that I live in a Purple America, and finally it became okay for me to call Charleston, SC my home after having lived there for more than four years.

Meanwhile, I developed a strong intuition that peace needs to be more visible and make more noise, and I thought, "What better way is there to do THAT than with music at a rally!" I got involved in the George Lakoff work, and I looked back at some of the "protest" songs that were sung at "demonstrations" 35 years ago and found them lacking. Autumn Drake agreed with me; she said, "Protest is the sound of victimization; rally is the sound of empowerment." So I wrote a song to celebrate our evolution "from antiwar to propeace."

This song is being launched as an experiment in virtual cooperative songbuilding. According to our Webmaster, it will be available as an MP3 download in either a rally version or a campfire version. The idea is to make it grow on-line as we keep collecting voice tracks of pairs and adding them to the mix - as in we in the Carolinas and y'all in MA or wherever a pair exists that would like to record a track and send it to our Webmaster to throw into the mix. (Details will be available at launch time.) Maybe by the time of the conference, it will actually sound like a White House lawn full of crowd!