This just showed up in my inbox for reasons I don't understand. I had never seen it before and want to share it.
I count my friendship with Plant as one of the stranger and more treasured occurrences of my life. It certainly is one that elicits the most curiousity from audiences when I am out speaking.
Here's his take on how it happened:
Thirty three years ago, I made these simple words the frontispiece of my book, Letters to My Son:
"We are born male; we must learn to be men".
This has been a theme in my writing ever since, and in many ways has been at the core of my respect for the Native American peoples -- the belief that a worthy manhood requires one to serve, not to dominate.
We currently have a president whose approach to manhood is, "Do what I say or I will hurt you".
I leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.
I have long believed that kindness is the most important character trait that we can teach our children. It has no religion; it belongs to no philosophical school of thought. It requires no insight, no empathy, no understanding. It can be active or passive. Everyone can practice it. Everyone does.
Everyone except Donald Trump.
Trump has a character defect that makes him incapable of understanding kindness as a moral act. To him kindness is transactional at best --- something you use to achieve an end, and usually practiced only as the withholding of cruelty; or weakness at worst -- something suckers do because they are naive.
Yesterday Donald Trump said he might drop a few more bombs on Iran "just for fun".
Monstrous and cruel as such pronouncements might be, they offer us a teachable moment.
Jesus counseled us to turn the other cheek and to forgive not seven times, but seventy times seven. Yet he also walked into the temple and turned over the tables of the money changers.
When cruelty rains from the sky 'for fun', or descends into our communities in jackboots and masks and pulls grandfathers into the cold in their undershorts and bathrobes, we no longer have to struggle with moral ambivalence. it is time to stop turning the other cheek and start turning over the tables.
Kindness must become an active, muscular force that protects the weak from the cruelty of the strong. And that is a worthy lesson to teach our children.
In the late 1800's, when the Native peoples across America were facing the hard truth that all that was good in their way of life was being obliterated by the relentless onslaught of American culture, a Paiute spiritual leader named Wovoka had a vision that this devastation could be stopped and reversed if the people danced in a circle, lived virtuously, and adhered to the old ways.
This became known as the Ghost Dance.
From the outside, the Ghost Dance appeared to be nothing more than a naive and hopeful dream, almost pitiable in its desperation.
As I watch the today's Democrats in Congress issue proclamations, subpoenas, and strongly worded letters of condemnation in an attempt to stop Trump's cruel depredations, I can't help but feeling that we are witnessing a modern-day Ghost Dance.
And I fear for my country and our children.