We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream

I have Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech on my iPod. Randomly, it played a few minutes ago.

I live in Mississippi. It's lush and green and slow and beautiful. But it's also hot and ugly and poor. It's a fucking third world country masquerading in a slow accent and self-righteous church slogans. Ignorance is celebrated.

Yeah, there are pockets of normality and yeah, there are nice people. This is my home. But I see now more than ever before the inherent racism in the judicial system, in the workplace, in the restaurants, and in the towns.

This is what I have learned from living here: Public school is for people of color. Private school is for the privileged white. The jobs with benefits, with salaries, with dignity are for the privileged white. People of color are not to be trusted, befriended, and certainly not ever under any circumstance are you to date outside your race.

Is this the ignorant ass with the rebel flag on his truck speaking? No. It is the well educated, the school teacher, the college student, the Judge, the police.

How the hell are you supposed to navigate life in this system nevermind actually succeed?

I don't know. I am one of the privileged white. I blend in and disappear in our society.

I have no hope. How can it ever change? How have we failed so miserably?

I've put the parts of the speech that stir in me the tiny belief that I can make a difference and that maybe, just maybe, it won't always be like this.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

I've got a number of irrational fears that I'd like to share with you

I had an epiphany while listening to Pinkerton. Not the first time this happened...

Pinkerton was the soundtrack to the Summer of '02. Ah, the glory days. The going away party that ended with a broken ankle, a broken karaoke machine, and me being smacked on the ass by an Asian foreign exchange student. (It was his first American party and you just have to roll with those sorts of things.)

Anyway, since then I have moved across the world, moved across the state, gotten married, got a real job, got health insurance, got a new car, and completely stopped listening to the old music from that part of my life.

With a few exceptions, I stopped listening to Burning Airlines, Braid, Weezer, the Dismemberment Plan, Jawbox and Jets to Brazil. Just. Stopped.

I think it's because I co-opted my taste in music from every stupid guy I dated and my music wasn't my own.

Three years later I would die before listening to the crap my husband likes (no offense baby, I really had fun at the Lambchop concert, I promise). I finally do not need anyone else to define who I am. I am not waiting for my Knight in Shining Armor.

Now when I listen my old music I try to feel the same emotions it used to evoke in me. It makes me feel weird like when you put on someone else's tennis shoes and they're worn in all the wrong places. It just doesn't fit anymore.

Pinkerton is no longer the soundtrack to my life. It's a great album with some great writing and lines like "words and dreams and a million screams" but I will no longer feel the same way about it. Ever.

The music will just have to learn how to deal with the new me.

and I get to fall in love with my favorite bands all over again.

This is not my beautiful life...

Well, for once it freaking is.

top ten songs for today:

10. Ash - Girl From Mars

ah...high school. reminds me of being a d.j. at a radio station that exactly 3 people listened to.

09. Bloc Party - So Here We Are

I'm only indie cause it's trendy

08. Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime

Could a song be more perfect?

07. Amerie - 1 Thing

I love it. I want to marry it.

06. Weezer - Good Life

I just need to admit I want sugar in my tea. O Rivers, what have you done......(beverly hills???)

05. Kasabian - Cutt Off

Sometimes I love this song, and sometimes I skip right over it. Today I love it. It makes me want to be on a secret mission in some former soviet bloc country.

04. T Rex - 2oth Century Boy

This song makes me want to wear silver clothes and blue eyeshadow and go to concerts. Mostly go to concerts.

03. Hallelujah - (the Rufus Wainwright one)

Has this song always been around? How have I never known about it??? I feel like if any of my super indie friends were here right now they would laugh at me for not knowing this song.

And from your lips she drew the hallelujah

I listen to that lyric over and over. I don't want to know how old this song is, I don't want to know what it is all about. I want to have the mental image of that lyric. Of drawing it out like poison.

02. Flood of Foreign Capital - Burning Airlines

This song is the auditory equivalent of "dover beach" by Matthew Arnold:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

01. Following Through - Dismemberment Plan

Travis Morrison is a Rock God. His lyrics articulate so much that I'm unable and unwilling to. Again, I would be afraid to ask him what they meant because my meaning is my own and I could only be disappointed.

I've got this life I've just got to live I'm just following through.

end.

I Hate Small Talk

"And you thought that I was joking when I said you were a moron.
When I said it I was smiling so you thought that I was joking.

The Futureheads - Meantime (approximation of the lyrics)

I feel like that a lot. I hate it when people don't say what they mean. I don't have the energy.

The Poetry of S Club 7

Don't stop movin' to tha funky funky beat.

The Poetry of The Boss

Lying out there like a killer in the sun
Hey I know it's late we can make it if we run
Oh Thunder Road, sit tight take hold
Thunder Road

Well I got this guitar
And I learned how to make it talk
And my car's out back
If you're ready to take that long walk
From your front porch to my front seat
The door's open but the ride it ain't free
And I know you're lonely
For words that I ain't spoken
But tonight we'll be free
All the promises'll be broken
There were ghosts in the eyes
Of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road
In the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

They scream your name at night in the street
Your graduation gown lies in rags at their feet
And in the lonely cool before dawn
You hear their engines roaring on
But when you get to the porch they're gone
On the wind, so Mary climb in
It's a town full of losers
And I'm pulling out of here to win.