Hello Everyone… Jesse here writing on the morning of the eve of the last day of the year… I hope 2009 is the best year all of us have ever had… Thanks so much to all of you who have been a part of our world this last year… and thanks for letting us be a part of your worlds…
In this final post for 2008… I wanted to just take a moment to think positive about the future… We all know that there are a lot of big issues in the world today… and there is a lot of confusion about what is going to happen next… So I’d like to just stay optimistic and remember that what kind of future we’re all going to have is up to each and every one of us… So… let’s see what we can do…
Resources like food and water are going to be increasingly important as the population on the planet increases and so we have to make sure that the people who are in charge of managing them are responsible and conscious people… and right now there is a lot of concern circulating about Barack’s potential choice for The Secretary of Agriculture… Tom Vilsack
Here’s a section of the Wikipedia file on Tom Vilsack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Vilsack):
“Opposition to a Vilsack appointment has come from the Organic Consumers Association, which outlined in a November 2008 report several reasons why it believes Vilsack would be a poor choice for the position, particularly as energy and environmental reforms were a key point of the Obama campaign.[15] Among those reasons the report cites: Vilsack has repeatedly demonstrated a preference for large industrial farms and genetically modified crops;[16] as Iowa state governor, he originated the seed pre-emption bill in 2005, effectively blocking local communities from regulating where genetically engineered crops would be grown; additionally, Vilsack was the founder and former chair of the Governor’s Biotechnology Partnership, and was named Governor of the Year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, an industry lobbying group.”
So please go check out this link to a petition you can sign to show that the public is not going to accept anything less than the best man for the job. This is the amazing thing about the internet, we can all communicate with each other quickly… and now people with shady pasts or ulterior motives cannot hide from the public… PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION:
And I hope everyone has a great safe night tonight… and a beautiful start to the new year…
LOVE
jrc
December 17.2008 >>>are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era
That subject title is the longest palindrome I know of… it reads the same forwards and backwards… wild… yes… I think i’ve written it before… but it really applies to this post… so.... there it is again…
Hello!!! Today is December 17th, 2008 and we are in Capetown, South Africa… There is a mountain ridge above this city called Table Mountain, and you can hike or take a tram up to the top of this ridge to see incredible views of the north, south, east and west… looking down on the cities and oceans around Capetown… And as the wind howls across the walkways at the summit, giant billowy clouds appear to pour over the edge of the top, drifting down until they evaporate… it’s amazing… but that’s not why I’m writing… I just happened to notice it outside this hotel window and got sidetracked…
I hope everyone is having a good day today… feeling good… excited about the holidays… family… friends… loves… even enemies… etc… i hope it’s been a good year for you… another full trip around the sun on our floating and spinning home of planet earth… I just watched a movie about BUCKMINSTER FULLER (the architect and philosopher and environmentalist and visionary man...) it’s called THE WORLD OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER… rent it… watch it… there are a lot of good ideas…
He has a lot of similar ideas about how to re-organizine society so that everyone has the ability to enjoy this mysterious experience of being alive as another movie I just watched that I’ll tell you about in one sec…
He says there is a major problem in the way that humans have been thinking about life… He says mankind has been stuck in a pattern of thinking that each person has to prove their worth, and they need to do so by Working a job that puts them on a level higher than someone else in society… which therefore entitles them to more of the worlds’ resources…
But it doesn’t HAVE to be that way…
Here’s a great quote from Bobby Kennedy paraphrasing the play-write George Bernard Shaw , “There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”
And that is what is on my mind right now… the idea that things are going to have to change… Bobby Kennedy also said, “A revolution is coming — a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough — But a revolution which is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.”
So… this makes me think… ok… we’re all in this together… the internet is an amazing phenomenon that links our thoughts, and allows us to quickly access the thoughts and ideas of other people so that we can work together to achieve common goals… And the continued survival, evolution, and refinement of the Human Race, (not to mention all of the other life forms on this planet) is a pretty good common goal… Has everyone seen the blog from some friends of ours in New York called SUPERFOREST.ORG… bookmark that and check out all the good inspiration that comes out of there… cause this is supposed to be a fun experience… we need little bursts of inspiration to make us continue, to feel good about being alive…
Ok… so anyway...there is a movie called ZEITGEIST ADDENDUM that is a follow up to the first ZEITGEIST film that came out a few years ago… The first movie dealt with a lot of darker aspects of our present condition around the world… yeah… it’s true there are a lot of darker elements… but they just need to be balanced out by really beautiful things… and this follow up movie has some very concrete and practical ideas for how to improve many situations that are currently causing so much suffering around our planet. So over this holiday season, if you can find the time, watch the Addendum movie… please do… and then we can start thinking about how to actually implement some of the changes that are being proposed by this movie… it’s gonna take a lot of cooperation… and a lot of peaceful, level headed communication because it’s no secret that people in power do not like to willingly give it up…
and why is that?
I think it’s because of the deep underlying anxiety caused by the fact that no one really knows why we’re alive in the first place… Maybe that’s a good place to start… trying to find an answer to the question of “what role is humanity supposed to play in the vast unfolding of the cosmos?”
Buckminster Fuller says that because we seem to be unique to all the other life forms on this planet in the way that our minds reason and think and feel and manipulate the physical world, that we have a responsibility to help things move into a more harmonious order. I don’t know if Harmony is the overriding principle of the universe, or if Chaos is… I guess it’s probably a combination of both… but let’s not leave the tracks… let’s stay with the idea of trying to figure out what we Humans should be doing in the next phase of all of our lives so that things get better, not worse…
Let’s try and figure out why some people would want to resist the idea of change… It seems that some people want to resist the idea of even thinking about whether or not things need to change… But I hope we can all agree that you don’t have to look very hard at the world to see that things are out of balance, and that something needs to happen to correct that imbalance… otherwise we’re headed towards oblivion as a species… yes? no? maybe so?… Well, here’s what I think about why people are resistant… (besides the obvious and simple idea that changing things requires effort and that’s more difficult to muster up than the easier short term choice of being apathetic… although the apathy thing doesn’t make you feel as good as doing something, does it?)
I’ve had the experience in this band of feeling the rush of having people excited just to meet you… to be perfectly honest, to have the power to make decisions about things that affect people other than yourself is somewhat of an intoxicating feeling… and I’m just talking about things related to a rock and roll band… The last time we were in Washington DC, I was looking at the White House, and just thinking how strange the feeling must be for these men and women in “charge” of the world when they make decisions about going to war, or changing the value of money, or creating a new energy plan that will create jobs… it’s probably a strange thing to have your fragile ego get a taste of an identity that has a lot of power… because at the heart of it… we’re all the same… human beings with the ability to feel and think and hope… and I think most people are very unaware of the effect that their subconscious mind, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, has on their decision making process… When people feel insecure about who they are and how they define themselves, they lash out and do whatever it takes to not feel “wrong"… The more power someone has, the more of a fall they would take if their identity gets threatened… This is not just a problem that causes us to fight with each other about the little dramas in our lives, it’s also a big problem with let’s say, religious warfare, because the very idea of doubt is very threatening to the ego, and that makes people very closed minded and aggressive…
So first, let’s just take a step back and be honest… Isn’t Doubt unavoidable? Can’t we work with it and not fight against it?… I don’t know if any amount of Faith can ever really satisfy the deep insecurities and doubts that I think we all have about why we’re here and how we should live… and that could be the reason that people are so quick to aggressively defend their particular beliefs. There is no doubt that faith can help provide meaning to a life, and there’s no doubt that religions can create a good system of behavior that would create a more peaceful world if only everyone in each religion actually lived the ideas that are being preached… There’s even no doubt that every religion could be exactly right in their views of existence, I mean after all, none of our brains can really comprehend what the term “Infinity” really means… and within infinity there would have to be an infinite number of scenarios, dimensions… in short… everything… EVERY...THING…
wow… it kind of hurts to even think about it… and I got de-railed again…
I just want us all to think… to really think and feel… actually… maybe feel is more important… to really feel what it is that we’re supposed to be doing to make the world a better place… and you know how catchy these things are… look at KIVA.ORG… an amazing charity organization that is really like a person to person banking loan system… you loan some money to an individual or small group somewhere in the world for something that need to run their farming business, or get supplies for their school, or help make their community safer, and then other people also lend small amounts to that same person, and then they get their whole loan and they pay each person back over a set period of time… really exciting…
And then there are all the new industries in the realm of sustainable energy production that will need help over the next couple years… the Zeitgeist Addendum movie paints a really beautiful picture of that growing aspect of the world…
So… what else?
What are we gonna do in 2009 and beyond?
I love you guys… hope you’re all still having a good day… thanks for everything this year… EVERY… THING… Our last show of the year is in a few hours… the last show of the whole last 22 month long world tour… Time to go home and regroup… get ready to make an amazing album, and who knows what else…
talk to ya soon… happy holidays… everyday…
namaste
jrc
We’re about to leave the hotel for the show in Belo Horizonte in
Brazil… Another big city… the people here that we’ve met have been
so nice, and the people coming to the shows have amazing energy…
Thanks very much everyone… MUITO OBRIGADO!!!
We’re in Rio right now… show tomorrow night… such a beautiful place… amazing mountains… the ocean… trees… birds… people smiling… a lot of poverty… traffic… a lot of traffic all over the world… I wonder if we’ll ever find another planet we can get to safely and live on… wouldn’t that be great… we’d know how to do a lot of things differently… we’d be able to figure out how many people the environment could comfortably and sustainably support… we’d use renewable energy sources like Wind and Solar from the beginning so we wouldn’t have such a pollution problem… and then we’d have more time to figure out why it is that humans have such a hard time getting along…
FOR EXAMPLE>>>
I was just thinking about what a good opportunity we have now for opening up the minds of people who don’t realize that their learned opinions of intolerance are not necessary… that they are just hurting innocent people, and adding negativity into the world. Tonight as I was reading all of the e mails I got about not letting the discriminatory law of Proposition 8 pass without a fight, I thought this is such a good way to start a positive dialogue with people who have different opinions… (especially when those opinions blatantly oppress and deny equal rights to a portion of the population)
Just in case you don’t know what this is all about… Proposition 8 takes away from homosexual people the equal rights to marriage and all of the legal and financial benefits that come along with it… What makes it even worse is that those rights were recently granted to them by the California Supreme Court by a ruling that was made on May of 2008…
And YAY… wasn’t that a great victory… yes… because… DUH… it’s not right to discriminate against people… right? but NO… because people who want to deny equal rights to homosexuals spent the second most amount of money on any election category other than the presidency and it looks like they may have won (although as I write this… all of the absentee ballots have not been counted yet...)
ANYWAY… there are many constructive ways to voice your opposition to this mean spirited and unnecessary proposition… so keep a look out for the ways that you can try and talk to people who have these types of prejudices… because there have always been humans who tried to oppress things they didn’t understand, or didn’t like… but there is also a great precedent of people coming together to fight for equality and justice and freedom and all those good words…
Happy Wednesday everyone!!! Happy day after the election!!!
truly momentous and exciting… I heard that John McCain gave a very gracious concession speech asking for the people who voted for him to turn their attention towards the work that needs to be done, supporting Barack Obama and continuing to try to get past partisan ideology and just focus on the problems at hand…
I hope it’s the start of some beautiful changes and progress in the United States, and all around the World.
We’re in Panama City right now… at a layover before boarding a flight to RIO… very interesting to have been in Mexico City last night on stage when the election results were announced… we were playing The Sun at the time… appropriate lyrics…
ANYWAY… I wanted to post here something I just read about… a Protest Rally for the passing of Proposition 8 in Los Angeles… TONIGHT… WED. NOV. 5th…
here’s the info:
PROP 8 PROTEST RALLY TONIGHT From 7pm TO 9pm at West Hollywood Park 647 N San Vicente Blvd. Contact Info (323)848-6460.
If you’re in LA and you are hopefully as outraged by the passing of this discriminatory proposition as you should be then check it out… I mean… it was only about 50 years ago that people were struggling to defeat racist laws during the Civil Rights movement… and here we are today with another type of prejudiced bigotry being passed into Law… CRAZY… this is just one of the many good fights of our times… and we’re all involved… I love you all… hope everyone is having a good day… we’ll see ya soon. jrc
Hi everyone… Jesse here in Atlanta… two more shows left on this summer tour… We all just watched the vice presidential debates and were very happy to hear everything put out there pretty clearly by the candidates… the choice should be pretty obvious to anyone who isn’t happy with the way things are going domestically or internationally… don’t you think? But no matter who you believe is gonna do a better job… Click on this link right now to get registered to vote: WWW.DECLAREYOURSELF.COM Because if you’re gonna get involved and get your voice heard, you’ve got to make sure you’re registered to vote… A LOT OF STATES HAVE AN OCTOBER 4TH DEADLINE FOR REGISTRATION… WHICH GIVES YOU JUST ONE MORE DAY…
HURRY IF YOU LIVE IN:
ALASKA
ARKANSAS
ARIZONA
COLORADO
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
HAWAII
ILLINOIS
INDIANA
KENTUCKY
LOUISIANA
MICHIGAN
MISSISSIPPI
MISSOURI
MONTANA
NEVADA
NEW MEXICO
NORTH CAROLINA
OHIO
PENNSYLVANIA
RHODE ISLAND
SOUTH CAROLINA
TENNESSEE
TEXAS
WASHINGTON
For all those states you have to register 30 days before the election… your deadline is October 4th (the other states vary between 25 days before november 4th, 15 days, or 10 days in some states, but no matter what state you live in… REGISTER NOW PLEASE!!!) It’s so easy to register… go to this DECLARE YOURSELF website… WWW.DECLAREYOURSELF.COM and please spread the word… thanks jrc
“The world is a very complicated place and there are not always easy solutions to a lot of the problems out there,” says John Brennan, a top Obama intelligence advisor and former senior CIA official who co-founded the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the National Counterterrorism Center, a post-9/11 effort to integrate the US government’s terror threat intelligence. “If you look at the world in black and white, you miss a lot of the subtleties out there. ‘Either with us or against’—the world is not divided into good and evil a lot of time. Despite America’s military might, a lot of these problems do not lend themselves to kinetic solutions"—i.e. the use of force. And world dynamics are likely to get more complicated and nuanced, not less, by 2025. An intelligence forecast being prepared by the US intelligence community for the next president “envisions a steady decline in US dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy,” according to the Washington Post.
Happy Saturday… just sitting in the back of the bus… listening to the Radiohead stems from the song Reckoner… I just downloaded them from the i tunes store for 99cents… separate tracks for Drums/Percussion, Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Piano/Strings… It’s so fun to listen to the different components of a song that you know so well… We’re gonna offer that to y’all soon… there is a very exciting project in the works from us…
I hope you’re having a great day… here’s a nice video to look at… jrc
Hi everyone… happy night-time… we just had a great show in Denver… so fun… And now it’s on to Kansas City… Hope you’re all having a good night… a good day… a good now…
Like I said, i wanted to write a bit more about what exactly everyone is talking about in the news these days…
Just in case you don’t know what’s going on, here is a brief synopsis of why we seem to have a problem on Wall Street, and why congress should hear from us… the public… that the first proposal from the Federal Treasury is unacceptable:
The Background: People buy homes with loans from banks, and they pay their loans back in their monthly mortgage payments, which are based on the current interest rates. When interest rates were low (set low by the federal government in order to stimulate the economy) many people took out loans. And it seems that many people didn’t understand that the interest rates on their loans could and would increase, thereby making their monthly payments unaffordable after a certain amount of time. Thus, many people lost their homes in foreclosures to the banks that gave them the loans in the first place… and then in the new higher priced climate, since people weren’t buying homes as much, the value of the housing market overall went down, thus the stocks of the banks that made their money by selling mortgages went down… some huge banks even had to declare bankruptcy… thus the entire Wall Street system was shaken and people began to take money out, or at least not put new money in, and suddenly the whole complicated internationally and domestically based American financial system showed signs of potentially grinding to a halt…
The Solution?: Therefore, after a few seemingly contradictory measures, such as letting one major bank declare bankruptcy, and then deciding to use 85 billion tax payer dollars to bail out the debts of another bank, the Federal Treasury unveiled a plan at 1 am on this last saturday morning asking URGENTLY for at least 700 billion dollars of tax payers money to fix the unstable conditions on Wall Street. And the truth is that everyone seems to agree that some major “bailout” such as this is necessary. And furthermore, everyone is confident that the economy will recover in time…
The Problem With the Solution: However, the specific terms of this proposal are dangerous because they give too much power to the one branch of the government that was supposed to be overseeing economic matters in this country and making sure that we didn’t get into a financial disaster like this in the first place. According to the New York Times, the proposal says that the Federal Treasury, which will be in charge of stabilizing the situation on Wall Street with at least 700 billion dollars of tax payers money, cannot be supervised, regulated or prosecuted “by any court of law or any administrative agency”. That request seems to ignore completely the system of checks and balances that this country was founded on.
So please join me in reaching out to our congress men and women, urging them to make sure any plan to fix the current financial instability is not only well thought out and regulated by a bi partisan oversight committee, but that it also distributes the burden of its 700 Billion dollar price tag not just on the tax payers, but also on the banks and financial institutions that helped get us into this mess. To fix this situation, it seems like we need level headed, calm, rational leadership… not frantic, fear based bully tactics that could pressure congress into passing a bill before it has been better thought out.
Below is the e mail from MoveOn.org which has a link to their online petition as well as the phone numbers to your states congress men and women. Thanks for your time… Again… Hope you’re having a great day. JRC
“From MoveOn.org Subject: Main Street before Wall Street
Hi,
This is outrageous. Bush wants taxpayers to give his administration a $700 billion check with no strings attached, which they’ll hand over to the Wall Street firms that got us into this financial mess.
Would it help families struggling to keep their homes? NO. Do taxpayers get any share of the firms we’re bailing out, so we can benefit from any eventual profit? NO. Would the firms we’re bailing out be required to stop paying their executives multimillion-dollar salaries? NO. This is a pure giveaway.
I signed a petition urging Congress to put Main Street before Wall Street, and to not give Bush a blank check. Can you join me at the link below?
Yay… new website… hope you like it… i’ll be interested to see what people do and don’t like about it… let us know…
So it is another beautiful day… i’m here in Boulder Colorado with my father the day before our Denver show… My dad is coming back on the road with us to take more photographs… should be nice… i just looked at all the shots he took in Japan… that trip seems like a long time ago… time really flies…
i hope y’all are having a great day.
and P.S. for any of you that already know that the latest Federal “Bail Out” proposal needs some reworking before we could feel comfortable with congress signing it into action… go to this www.MoveOn.org petition and sign your name…
for those of you who don’t know about it… i’m gonna write something up that hopefully makes it easy to understand and get involved with… and i’ll post that soon, but i just wanted to spread this link as soon as possible because this really is something congress needs to hear public disapproval about... Thanks a lot.
AND, as I promised, in the spirit of balanced blogs, for every “citizen responsibility” link I add, I’ll also put up just some cute inspirational animal video… =) jrc
We gotta start doing more video blogs… we’ll get on this soon… Another fun show tonight… this time outside of Portland… great crowd… thanks to everyone who came out to the show… I wonder if my new friends I met at the Vietnam memorial out by Washington Park were there… hope you guys are feeling good today…
namaste…
well… life is trippy… isn’t that a crazy understatement? life is soooo trippy… I was reading a book that james gave me called The Inner Game of Tennis… and it had this passage about how amazing the human body is, how subconsciously interconnected everything is… how right now as you’re reading this, your eyes are differentiating between the color of the letters and the background… comparing them with our memories of other symbols and forming words and cohesive thoughts out of the combination of words… and all the while, our heart is beating constantly and our organs are gathering the essential elements from our food… and on and on and on… it’s just a wonder how everything works…
isn’t it all so wild??? and to think that our bodies grew themselves, and all the hair and skin and bones and everything that keeps growing… how do we know how to DO this?
crazy… We’re off to Seattle tomorrow… and then on and on…
I just wanted to say hello… and put up a nice video i just saw… here it is…
I was going to put up a post that I found on on http://www.huffingtonpost.com about something to do with the election… but then I decided to just ... not put up anything about the election… Still, that huffington post website is full of good information if you’re interested… and you SHOULD be interested because so much of our deeply interconnected world will be affected by the outcome of this election, and we’d better hope that whoever “wins” is gonna help the most amount of people possible… there is just SO much stuff on the internet… it’s amazing.
everything is amazing… all of these beautiful things and all of these tragic things happening side by side everyday… we all just gotta keep breathing deeply and doing our best…
what a mystery life is…
Hope you’re having a great night… and I hope this Sunday is a day of rest and relaxation for you. Love, jrc
So here we are… how are you? Another day… how did you sleep? enough? feeling rested? busy? happy? stressed? First of All… thanks to you all for coming out to our shows with the counting crowes and augustana and sara bareilles ... this has been our favorite tour so far… and we’ve really had a great time with y’all so far. Second of all… Someone responded to the last blog about this upcoming US election with the question “is it really all that simple?” and… i don’t know the answer… part of me says Of course it’s not simple… there are SO many people on this planet, and all of us are leading unique lives with totally different circumstances shaping our worldviews… but then on the other hand, if you look at it from a certain angle, that fact does indeed become simple… because if we realize that not everyone thinks about the world the way that we do, and we give people space to lead their lives according to their beliefs, then hopefully we can figure out a way to set up a structure in society that cares for everyone’s health and basic needs. Now, i know that there are times when certain peoples worldviews include some kind of insane belief that people with opposing viewpoints from theirs need to be killed… for either economic gain, or in the name of God…
In either case, i hope we can all agree that it’s just not right to go out and kill people… It seems hard to imagine that any divine force out there (an all powerful, all knowing entity that we could call God… or Allah… or Krishna… or Boran… or Shangdi… or Thixo, Gunab, or Tsui… or any other name that humans have given the unfathomable… go look on widipedia for Names of God) would actually want us to kill people who used a different name for IT… I like to think of the different interpretations of this divine force as cultural nicknames… they’re endearing… sometimes people have lots of nicknames… it’s not surprising that God would have lots too. God is very popular.
I don’t know how to deal with those people who kill for the second reason… I’d like to just say “Look!!! No single person on this planet ACTUALLY knows what God’s will is for us humans… but most people agree that God is interested in us leading basic moral lives… don’t kill others… try not to cause suffering… etc… The golden rule sounds pretty good to me… or as the classic movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure so eloquently put it… “Be Excellent to Eachother… and… Party on Dudes!!!!”
So… to answer your question “is it really all that simple"… I guess i’m gonna go with: NO… it’s not that simple when you try and deal with the whole world… obviously each of us as individuals can’t really change the sweeping scope of this human drama… but we can do our part by trying to peaceful and loving in our own lives… looking deeply into our selves and finding our flaws and working to make them better… respecting each other… finding joy and spreading it… blah blah blah…
I love you guys… I love seeing all the different opinions… and i’m just trying to think about practical things that can be done to make the world a better place… Voting is an important one… especially in this election because things seem pretty chaotic right now. But to be honest, that’s just the beginning because we all have a responsibility to do our part… I hope we can figure out a way to keep making things better before things get a lot worse...
Here’s a video I wanted everyone to see to just put a simple light on a major problem of the political process, which is that important issues get overshadowed by petty and childish arguments… check it out:
and also… here’s a link to Joe Biden’s speech from the DNC:
Hello From Dallas Texas… another beautiful day… we’re about ready to leave the hotel and go to soundcheck… I’m watching the speeches of Sarah Palin and John McCain… and I just wanted to pass them along to you so you could watch them and see what you think.
I hope you’re having a great day.
Thanks for watching these and taking the time to just look at both sides of this election…
I’m thinking a lot about this election these days because it’s such an important time and i know how much we all want things to just get better. It’s kind of overwhelming isn’t it? War… Lack of Jobs… Gas prices… Climate Change… Devastating Storms… Pollution… Overflowing Land Fills… Overpopulation… Lack of Food and Drinking Water… Fear of terrorism… Distrust of Politicians… Anger… Racism… Ignorance… Fear… phew…
I feel like making a list to counteract that one... Friendship… Love… Family… Hope… Music… Art… Sports… Plumbing… Clothing… The Postal Service (the actual postal service that delivers mail all around the world with an unbelievably high success rate for unbelievably low prices… not the band… but, yeah… now that i think of it… the band too)… Cell Phones… The Internet… Communication… Language!!!… Movies… Eyesight… All the senses… Dreams… Nature… Cities… Recycling… Sustainable Farming… Responsibility… Honor… Nobility… Forgiveness… ETC…
I think we just need to take a deep breath… get informed about what we can do as individuals… and also make the best decision about who to vote for in this next election. What we DON’T need is any kind of divisive or angry or defensive energy… that is my least favorite part of politics… such a distraction from the issues… we need UNITY and UNDERSTANDING and OPEN-MINDED-NESS…
Here’s another blog to bookmark… my friends in New York seek out inspiring things and post them here…
hey everyone… happy daytime… or night time… or whatever… hi.
what a beautiful day it is in los angeles… sunshine… blue skies… etc…
i just wanted to make a post with a link to Barack Obama’s speech from the DNC last week… it was an amazing speech, and I think that everyone in America should watch it regardless of what political party they “belong” to…
I’m looking forward to seeing what John McCain has to say in his upcoming speeches... honestly, i don’t consider myself a democrat or a republican… honestly I don’t even like to think of myself as an “American"… which is not to say that I don’t love this country… especially the amazing ideas that it was founded on… but I just consider myself a human being who was lucky enough to be born on planet earth on part of this continent known as The United States of America with all of its beautiful and also complicated and also ugly and also noble and wonderful (etc) history… Personally, because I get to travel all around the world, and see how similar people are in different countries, I just wish there was more of a spirit of the United Countries of the World, and not so much divided interests in just our individual countries… but that’s a whole other issue…
getting back to this election… i just want to help elect whichever candidate I believe is going to do the most amount of good for the most amount people, and also put this country back in good standing with the rest of the world… I know we all want that… so let’s just keep watching the speeches, and researching the candidates… it just takes a little time… and then we’ll know… and then we’ll choose…
and also… here are some interesting photos from the protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis… did anybody see any news coverage of protests from the RNC? lemme know what where you saw it… and what it was like… thanks... http://www.motherjones.com/:
greetings and salutations… fellow people of the earth… wow… hello.
i’m in washington DC… it was another great fun show tonight… thanks to those of you who’ve come out to the shows so far… this has truly been the best tour ever… onwards and upwards (until the inevitable decline? NO… it can be upwards always… right?)
OK… so… who likes animals? who wants to help an animal shelter that takes in stray puppies, cleans them up and finds them homes? good… here’s the link to this wonderful place in Los Angeles, and you can make a paypal donation on their site… or maybe someone you know is looking for a fundraiser cause… this could be it!!! save the puppies!!!
happy wednesday night… july the ... the somethingth… i’m sitting at home just a few days before we take off for our summer tour… very exciting… our rehearsals have been going well and there are some good new surprises for y’all…
I’m listening to Sly and the Family Stone… the song called IN TIME… have you ever heard it? it’s crazy how good this song sounds… such amazing musicians…
SO!!! the reason i wanted to write this post… besides to celebrate that tomorrow night is the full moon for all of us here on earth… is to talk about the Amnesty International Video we made for the album version of the song If I Never See Your Face Again. My dad shot all the photographs for the video, and then he and some very talented friends put the video together and then donated it to Amnesty… it’s a really beautiful thing to have my Dad, who has supported my love for music for my whole life, come out on the road with us and share the experience of traveling with this band…
I just wanted to see if you all had seen it… check it out and spread the word… spread the love… thanks for everything. Hope you’re doing well today. Love, JRC
