Missing Song

There is a quietude about my students, a disturbing quiet. A quiet born of years of benign indifference. Indifference and neglect engendered by adults, parents and teachers, who, living in the messed up parts of their lives, have been unable to give students a dream to dream, a song to sing.

The adults are not bad people. Very little malfeasance occurs in this world. There is an abundance of victims, and paucity of perpetrators. Who is to blame for a generation that has no song to sing, no dreams to dream?

Perhaps we all are. The divorced parents who chose their immediate selfish gratification over the investment in laudable perpetual offspring outcomes. The mediocre teachers who never read HUCK FINN, languished in mediocrity, and recreated that mediocrity in their students.

Who is to blame?

Judges 4:3-4 The Israelites cried out for help to the Lord, because Sisera had nine hundred chariots with iron-rimmed wheels, and he cruelly oppressed the Israelites for twenty years. Now Deborah, a prophetess, wife of Lappidoth, was leading Israel at that time.

The land was in turmoil. There was judgement galore, and surely the Israelites deserved it. There were no more dreams, no more songs.

But God raised up an alternative culture, a culture of meritocracy, a culture of hope. Deborah and her colleague Barak scourged the land of its enemies. And song returned to the land . . .

Judges 5:1 On that day Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang this victory song:

“When the leaders took the lead in Israel,
When the people answered the call to war
Praise the Lord!
Hear, O kings!
Pay attention, O rulers!
I will sing to the Lord!
I will sing to the Lord God of Israel!
O Lord, when you departed from Seir,
when you marched from Edom’s plains,
the earth shook, the heavens poured down,
the clouds poured down rain.
The mountains trembled before the Lord, the God of Sinai;
before the Lord God of Israel.

Brothers and sisters, let us be the “Deborahs” to this generation. Let us dream dreams, sing songs again.

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