Quick Take
What if resistance sounded less like shouting – and more like harmony? Santa Cruz family therapist Lisa Herendeen is planning to march Saturday at the “No Kings” protest in Santa Cruz, and to sing. She has been attending protest song practice sessions with a group of local singer-songwriter-activists who believe in the power of collective voices of song. Local musicians Heather Houston and Aileen Vance have organized the sessions. Singing might not topple power, Herendeen writes, but it just might shift the energy. And that, she believes, is where real change often begins.
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At the second “No Kings” march last October, I commented to my friend Lisa that the march organizers needed to get us all dancing. Dancing unites people, I told everyone who would listen to me.
And it will piss off the administration if we are joyful.
Last week, Lisa called me and said, “Your march fantasies are being heard, some community leaders are organizing songs to sing at the next march in Santa Cruz.” Local singer-songwriters, music teachers and activists Heather Houston and Aileen Vance are leading it, she told me.
Singing is pretty close to dancing, I reasoned, so I told her to count me in. Plus, I have gone to Heather Houston events before, and they are excellent because you always come away feeling good.
I am predicting a good turnout for Saturday’s march, in both Santa Cruz and Watsonville, because most of us want to be able to say that we did something other than watch the news or complain on social media when our country went insane. With that many people, there needs to be ways to channel the strong emotions into creativity.
I heard about the Singing Resistance event through friends, and they heard about it through the Center for Spiritual Living and social media. Someone did a good job of advertising, because on Sunday morning, I heard, there were no more seats left.
Thanks to Lisa’s tip, I had already registered. On a Sunday afternoon, I gathered with 70 other people at the Resource Center for Nonviolence on Ocean Street across from the Hotel Paradox. Lisa and her husband, James, saved me a seat in the crowded auditorium. As soon as I sat down, James quipped that he was one of the few people in the room with a Y chromosome. After a quick perusal of the room, I realized he was right. It was mostly women over 40. He and a man sitting behind us did a fist-bump to acknowledge each other, because I guess that is what men do when they are outnumbered. Then the lights went down and the show began.
Santa Cruz has a number of women and a few men with beautiful, strong voices and good leadership skills. We sang for about an hour and it was uplifting. In addition to Heather and Valerie, Susan Moren, Michael Levy and Debbie Nargi-Brown got us to harmonize the protest songs well in such a short time. We learned the same songs that the Minnesota protesters sang after U.S. citizens Renee Good and Andre Pretti were killed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents for peacefully protesting.
One song, “It’s Okay to Change Your Mind” by Annie Schlaefer, reminds ICE agents that they don’t need to kill people, and this choked me up a bit because it brought home the gravity of our current situation. Young disenfranchised men about the age of my son are the ICE agents who are being sent to put down the protesters and end up shooting innocent people. It is so chaotic and horrific.
Our singing and marching group will gather at 9 a.m. at the corner of Dakota and Soquel avenues. We will be the ones in white – possibly with red and turquoise accents – to help us stand out and stay together. A standing-only singing group will meet at 10 a.m. at Cooper Street and Pacific Avenue in downtown Santa Cruz.
Will singing at the protest do any good?
Who knows? But I think it’s the wrong question. We have to start thinking more creatively, more humanely, if we are going to shift anything within our increasingly polarized nation.
I am not surprised the first meeting was mostly women. Women or feminine sensibility have always been the social glue that holds society together and often calms down situations. We need this sort of attunement in our current male-dominated world.
There is a second meeting this Friday, March 27, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Resource Center for Nonviolence.
Once when I worked in family court for a lawyer, I was assisting with a stressful divorce trial. During a break, I pulled out my crocheting project in order to teach our office intern how to do the double crochet stitch. Soon, we had about five male lawyers in suits watching us and reminiscing about their moms or sisters. Everyone seemed to calm down as I explained the finer points of knotting yarn together, and we joked around with the lawyers.
Court is one of those oppressively masculine places devoid of creative flow that we humans need. The introduction of the yarn shifted the dynamic. It literally knit us together in a new way.
Compared to that courtroom, our world is about 100 times worse and on steroids. At least in family court there were rules. In fact, I sort of appreciate the court system right now.
My point is that these are stressful times and they call for out-of-the-box thinking. Perhaps we can appreciate feminine ways of knowing that aren’t in the mainstream book of coping. Perhaps singing will be a small shift we need.
The main thing is to go out, stand tall and have fun on “No Kings” day Saturday. I will be hanging with the women dressed in white singing protest songs. Or if my total fantasy comes true, then a DJ will pop up on Pacific Avenue and a dance party will break out.
Those kinds of things happen in Santa Cruz.
Lisa Herendeen, LCSW, M.Ed., is a private practice psychotherapist working with couples, families and individuals in Santa Cruz. Before she became a therapist, she was a writer for various political organizations in Washington, D.C.