Everyday People

There is a blue one who can't accept the green one
for living with the black one trying to be a skinny one
Different strokes, for different folks!

And so on, and so on, and scooby-dooby-doo. 

This is the way the world looked to Sly Stone back in 1968. Sly went to the big funkhouse in the sky this past Monday. It seems likely that circumstances here on earth were far too terrible for him to stick around. More than fifty years after he encouraged us all to live together in peace, the world seems to be tearing itself apart. The blue and green ones are no closer to living together now than they were back when Dick Nixon was president. 

I was six years old back then, and I carry memories of riots that raged across the country at that time. Many point to the assassination of Marting Luther King Jr. as the spark that lit the fuse. Racial tensions were at an all-time high, mixed with the frustrations stirred by the continued war in Vietnam. Public opinion was divided in ways that reached a boiling point, culminating in the election of the "law and order" candidate for president (checks notes), Dick Nixon. 

Sly Stone's was not the only voice calling for tolerance, but he put it so succinctly that school children could get it: 

I am no better, and neither are you.
We are the same whatever we do.
You love me, you hate me, you know me and then,
you can't figure out the bag I'm in. We've got to live together!

School children like myself who were taught the lyrics to that song in classrooms that fostered the kind of minds that might question authority. I grew up in a bit of hippie enclave. The peace and love that I heard about was not what I saw on the nightly news. That same hate-induced vacuum for understanding is on full display right now. I understood at that very early age that calling in the National Guard was not the answer to the question, "Why can't we live together in peace?"

And still the music of Sly Stone rings in my ears as I watch tear gas and rubber bullets being fired on protestors who are angry and afraid. 

Sometimes I'm right, I can be wrong.
My own beliefs are in my song.
A butcher, a banker, a drummer, and then
makes no difference what group I'm in

Sly Stone danced hard across the Terra. His music is n ithe DNA for all the songs about hope and freedom that came after. He will be missed by us Everyday People. 

Yeah Yeah.