Rosy New Years

Another New Year coming up and yet New Year's eve is like every other night. There is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be  noted - and yet no person has quite the same thoughts on that evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights. It may give us another chance to do better.

 

"In some places a rumor without a leg to stand

on will get around some other way."

There is something that our dance society calls each of us when it wants to put us in our place, when it wants to shut us up, when we have been too loud, too big, too opinionated, too successful, too far beyond what is considered acceptable for whatever group we fall into. In town the Creative Researchers And Producers usually decide it. And now there is an all ladies group too, the "Ladies Into Easy Screening."

Our blogs are the beginning of the Soap Box theory in a new mode. Most of the young have never heard of the Soap Box. It happened many year ago before radio, TV and the Internet. A person wanted to be heard and grabbed a Soap Box and took it to Park and got up on it. Hopefully he would be heard but mostly to only a few.

But attempts to be heard have been there for millenniums back. If you remember "The Tragedy of Julius Ceasar" by Shakespeare, written 300 years ago, about something that happened 1700 years before that, there is a good example.

In killing Ceasar, the conspirators make clear that they committed this act for Rome, not for their own purposes and do not attempt to flee the scene. After Caesar's death, Brutus delivers an oration defending his actions, and for the moment, the crowd is on his side.

However, Mark Antony, with a subtle and eloquent speech over Caesar's corpse — beginning with the much-quoted "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears" — deftly turns public opinion against the assassins by manipulating the emotions of the common people, in contrast to the rational tone of Brutus's speech, "And Brutus is an honorable man."

"Over The Rainbow" by Bruddah Iz

Our wish for all in the Chinese New Year: "May your hand always be stretched out in help and friendship, never in want."