December 07, 2010 12:41 AM UTC

One More Time in the Tenth Second

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• by: JO

For your Christmas present to the world, your gift on the nth night of Hannukah, your acknowledgment of your humanity,

Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

In the 10th second you will see what this is about. If you haven’t watched the video, none of this will make the least sense. So watch the video first. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

I dare you to watch it and not be haunted by the image in the 10th second, and those following. Yes, you think you know, you’ve known all along, so bellies up to the bar across the street from the softball fields of St. Jude of Schmooze. But you need to be reminded, time and time and time and time again, until you–we– are moved to do something and then do something more. What that might be is up to you.

This is what politics is about. The video is not about Dawn Upshaw. It is not about whether your father’s second cousin thrice removed by his fourth wife’s fifth daughter once saw Dawn Upshaw for six seconds on her way to Studio 7 to record music that you like. No, the music, the video, the diary is about its title of the symphony: Song of Sorrows. It is about the Tenth Second.

Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

It is not about what you know, or like, or think, or feel. It is about what you do.  Whether or not you can stand in Tianmen Square and stop a tank as one man once did.  Whether or not you can hold a spoon in western Sudan or eastern Chad or anywhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo. You can march in Solidarnosc to change the immutable, if not forever then at least for a day, or a year, or a decade. On the eve of the bonuses, paid early this year to avoid the taxes, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12… you can write, email, shout out.

You can make the connection! You can help others make it. The one million and first dollar of the bonus is merely a down payment to sate the insatiable: greed. It is the greed that needs to be wrapped in a shroud, while the one millionth and first dollar, and every dollar after it, goes first to feed the hungry. And when that is done, what’s left goes to help fulfill the dream of every mother lying awake under the same stars: a better life for her child.

Watch the video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

Then next year you can hear the Buckaroos Choir sing Joy to the World at the Spendalot Mall and put Cash back into Christmas.