July 21 , 2006
Hello,
It's been three months since my last letter was posted. I've participated in several special events and I'd like to mention them here...
The first was a fund raiser for a friend, an incredible folk musician and dancer who was also a former music teacher of mine. Bill Vanaver had undergone emergency heart surgery after a severe heart attack in April. Although his family was insured, the astronomical costs of intensive care, surgery and rehabilitation were beyond their means. With the help of Pete Seeger, Susan Mc Keown, Jay Unger and The Klezmatics, we were able to raise $55,000. The show had a wonderful feeling of a strong and compassionate community coming together to help one another. I sang several songs with Pete Seeger, ("Which Side Are You On?", "Jacob's Ladder", "Turn, Turn,Turn", "If I Had A Hammer", "This Land Is Your Land"). Pete is so disarmingly down to earth that it's possible to forget what a towering legend he is. But when he steps on stage, it's like watching history in the making. It was one of the best nights I can remember on stage.
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| Natalie with Pete Seeger at Bill Vanaver Benefit photo by Michael Weisbrot |
Singing with Wynton Marsalis and his group at the annual benefit concert for the Jazz at Lincoln center's educational program was well worth the experience. I have to admit that walking into the rehearsal hall and being confronted by a combined 200 years of musical training and stage experience was a bit intimidating. I was handed sheet music of an arrangement Wynton had composed and listened to a controversy over a flatted sixth note in the 74th bar and could feel my throat closing up with panic. I have no formal musical training and read music like a first level piano student. Wynton was so gracious and kind, the arrangement he had written for my song, "The Worst Thing" was so complex, wonderfully textured and beautiful. After rehearsal he invited all the musicians involved in the benefit to his apartment for a dinner party and included us in a traditional blues improvisation at the piano in his living room. We each took a turn singing and it was pretty wild playing that sort of parlor game with Tracy Chapman and Joe Cocker. The show at the Apollo Theater was a great time.
The third benefit was much more somber, the 85th birthday of the radical catholic peace activist Father Daniel Berrigan. It was a gathering of about 700 people in a church basement on New York's upper east side. All the funds raised at this benefit were contributed to the legal aid fund for The Saint Patrick's Four, a group of catholic worker members from Ithaca, New York. All were finishing jail terms for a war protest action at an army recruiting office in their hometown. In attendance were some of the leading figures in America's anti-war movement that was born out of the Vietnam conflict. Howard Zinn, Ramsey Clark, Kurt Vonnegut and Amy Goodman were among the speakers who took to the stage to pay tribute to Father Berrigan's life-long commitment to peace and to express their disbelief, shame, sadness, dismay, rage over the current conflict in the Middle East.
At the benefit, this quote (and it's unlikely source) was brought to my attention:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
—Former U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in a speech on April 16, 1953
I also found these quotes in literature distributed at Father Berrigan's party:
"The arms trade is a major cause of human rights abuses. Some governments spend more on military expenditure than on social development, communications infrastructure and health combined. While every nation has the right and the need to ensure its security, in these changing times, arms requirements and procurements may need to change too."
"Global military expenditure and arms trade is also the largest spending in the world at 900 billion dollars, annually. As world trade globalizes, so does the trade in arms. In order to make up for lack of domestic sales, newer markets must be created. USA, Russia, France and Britain do the largest businesses of arms trade in the world. Sometimes, these arms sales are made secretly and sometimes knowingly to human rights violators, military dictatorships and corrupt governments. This does not promote democracy in those nations."
—Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SPIRI)
And these alarming statistics about arms sales to developing nations which was taken from a congressional report last year. The US is the world's major supplier of arms to the developing world by far:
| Supplier | Total Dollars | Percentage of total sales |
| United States | out of $107,907 (million dollars) | 40% |
| Russia | out of $41,765 (million dollars) | 16% |
| France | out of $26,721 (million dollars) |
10% |
| Germany | out of $18,384 (million dollars) |
7% |
| United Kingdom | out of $12,991 (million dollars) |
5% |
| China | out of $9,001 (million dollars) | 3% |
| Italy | out of $4,862 (million dollars) |
2% |
| Other European | out of $ 31,168 (million dollars) |
12% |
| Others | out of $16,577 (million dollars) |
6% |
| —The Grimmett Report, Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 1997-2004 , Report for Congress, U.S. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, August 29, 2005 | ||
Just a reminder of who is footing the bill:
| 1950: | 1990: | |
|---|---|---|
| Individual share | 61% | 84% |
| Corporate share | 39% | 16% |
"If 100 people in the U.S. had a combined total of $100, one person would have $40, four people would have $5, and 95 people would have 42 cents."
— The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
"An estimated 41.7 million, or 15.6 percent of Americans are without health care."
—Journal of the A.M.A.
More Later,
Natalie
