Reflection!

Forgotten Verse
Joseph Baruch Warren

At the Seattle Cluster Meeting last Friday Erin included in out
agenda, pictures of the gang from Cheers, the TV show about the Boston
bar that, from 1982 to 1983 was broadcast to a nation longing for a
sense of community and camaraderie portrayed among the sometimes goofy
bar tenders and drinkers. The theme of the meeting was "community,"
so the agenda decoration was absolutely appropriate.
People who know me understand that being handed a piece of paper with
pictures of the Cheers gang will, inevitably will lead to me, singing
the theme song.
I started with the opening verse, which everyone knew from a decade of
weekly broadcasts on NBC, and two decades of daily broadcasts on
channel 11 during our most formative years.

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.
Wouldn't you like to get away?
Sometimes you want to go, where everybody knows your name,
and they're always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see, our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

This was a definition of community that we could agree upon. The
members of the community get together, know each other, and share each
other's sorrows and troubles.
Then I started remembering the other verses:

All those night when you've got no lights,
The check is in the mail;
And your little angel
Hung the cat up by it's tail;
And your third fiancé didn't show

And

Roll out of bed, Mr. Coffee's dead;
The morning's looking bright;
And your shrink ran off to Europe,
And didn't even write;
And your husband wants to be a girl

As you can, no doubt see, the definition of community we had agreed
upon initially, a bar full of friendly drunks who knew who you were is
transformed. The 'troubles' that are 'all the same' are far from
universal. Transgendered spouses, psychopathic children, repeated
abandonment at the alter; these are pretty specialized and intense
'troubles' to share among all community members. In fact, these are
the kinds of problems that most of us would look at as the problems of
an entirely separate other. We can look at these 'troubles' and, far
from saying that they are the same as our own, we can say, "At least I
don't have those problems, no matter how bad my life is."
But the song tells us otherwise. In this definition of community that
we had agreed upon, our troubles, no matter how severe, were shared at
a fundamental level by everyone in the community. We don't just feel
sorry for the person abandoned by her psychiatrist just as she is
losing the connection that she thought she had with her spouse, we
genuinely share the pain and loneliness she is experiencing. Our
Troubles are all the same. The community truly shares the burden of
the trouble, not just pity or money or booze.
When I got to the second and third verses of the song, everyone
laughed. They had never heard the verses, and thought that I was
making them up. It may well have been the result of the really damned
funny lyrics. It may have been my struggle to remember them after all
the years since the show went off the air that made them think I was
improvising lyrics. But more influential was, I think, the shock of
realization that our seemingly easy-to-agree-upon definition of
community held some very demanding requirements of community members.
Just because we say we can universally accept an idea as a good thing,
does not mean that we are willing to follow through with it when the
idea becomes complex or demanding. Once the rats have been drowned,
we don't want to, um, pay the piper.
One of the examples of this phenomenon that I find most jarring is out
national exploitation of the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Like the first verse of Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Americans can
agree with near universality on the wisdom of King's "I Have a Dream"
speech. But when his speeches and writings (most of which are
shockingly out of print) beyond the "I Have a Dream" first verse
demand more of us, we tend to shy away, or laugh it off.
While we AMEN to "I Have a Dream," most of America refuses to practice
or believe in the idea that vast social change can, and even must
happen through nonviolent means. While we can all celebrate the
possibility that some day the State of Alabama "will be transformed
into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able
to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together
as sisters and brothers," very few of us seem willing to work towards
the fundamental changes needed to fight racist economic, political and
social systems.
Last MKL Day, in fact, the image was delivered of our president,
George W. Bush placing a wreath on King's grave. Bush, a president
who was, arguably, owes his presidency to the systematic
disenfranchisement of African American voters; Bush, who brought his
country to war based on premises that have proved to be shaky at best,
was honoring the greatest hero of the civil rights and antiwar
movements.
When we forget the second and third verses, and the huge tasks that
they require of us to truly belong to a community; when we forget
everything about Dr. King's life that doesn't fall within the four
paragraphs we memorized for 5th grade social studies, and when we see
our National Service as something smaller, and lighter than it really
is, we severely stunt our potential.
When Lyndon Johnson established Volunteers In Service To America, the
first incarnation of National Service as we experience it, the goal
was the elimination of poverty in America. It wasn't to make American
poverty more comfortable, or to reduce the number of people on welfare
by a certain percentage. It wasn't to make poor folk smile. The goal
was to be a fundamental shift in the way the country works.
While the first "verse" of our Service is easy to warm to; people in
grey shirts cleaning streams, working at food banks, tutoring
underserved children, recruiting college aged volunteers, we have to
remember that there is a second verse to the Americorps theme song.


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