While the jukebox containing the music that is the soundtrack of my life includes a really, really heavy dose of Springsteen, there is also plenty of music from artists not named "Bruce Springsteen". This weekend, as I started to read the stories about yet another mass shooting in these United States, this one in Buffalo, New York perpetrated by the deadliest of oxymorons, a "white supremacist", I found myself whistling the tune to one of my favorite songs written and performed by the late, great Warren Zevon who, himself, owns more than a small chunk of real estate in my aforementioned jukebox.
"Don't Let Us Get Sick" was on Zevon's 2000 album, Life'll Kill Ya. Roughly two years after the album's release, Warren Zevon was diagnosed with mesothelioma. On September 7, 2003, mesothelioma killed him. He was fifty-six years old. Although he wrote and recorded "Don't Let Us Get Sick" prior to his diagnosis, or maybe because he did, it is a song whose meaning I have always interpreted as being something akin to an old man's prayer, perhaps even his dying prayer, and his wish for the world. Its chorus, which I have always found to be especially beautiful, is elegiac.
Don't let us get sick,
Don't let us get old.
Don't let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave.
And make us play nice.
And let us be together tonight.
These days, in these United States, we not only appear to be hell-bent on demonstrating new ways of proving that "getting stupid" is cure-proof, but we also have long abandoned even the pretense of playing nice with one another. It is a one-two punch that, if permitted to continue unabated and unchecked, shall sound the death knell for the Republic, which lest we forget has not yet existed for two hundred and fifty years. How do we? I know not. Maybe, just maybe, a small first step is putting Zevon's words into action...
...and maketh our spirits to shine.
-AK
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