Earth Riot Radio

The “repetition” of the song’s “melody-tone tempo,” she explains, provides a shared sonic “meeting place” and “stage” where our emotions can temporarily liberate individual identities. What Savitri D calls the “transformational potential” of singing with other people and (we would add), singing with the songs that radiate from the forest at night, a coral reef, an alpine meadow... Your favorite eco-system has a symphony of songs. Sing along and have your action.

In this week's "Earth Riot" we bring in Estonia, where song-power is demonstrated by Estonia's resistance to Stalinism and Nazism with huge concerts starring the whole country! and - Chile, resisting the fascist Pinochet and his killers with the songs of Victor Jara and the womens' chanting dance: "The Rapist in Your Path".  From our own continent we have Sam Cooke believing that "A Change is Gonna Come" and Ojibwai drummers up in their spirit, as your hosts Savitri D and Reverend Billy hold forth with the Earth's soundtrack.  Earthalujah!   

So here we go. I know a theatrical woman named Lois Weaver who says "The Only Way Home Is Through the Show". Well, amended to reflect our current world-wide inferno, we could say "The Only Way Home Is Through the Heat Wave". Or the only way home is through our money-sucking karma, our religious wars, our fetish for forever toxins. But please - I want to preach about how to LOVE.

We are the "Earthchxrch", and for 20 years we were "The Church of Stop Shopping" - and emerging from the lie of virtuality was our thing. But now, with every month a record-breaking nightmare of heat, and the scientists telling us that the computer modeling doesn't work anymore because everything is exploding, we are left alone with the Earth. The Earth gives us the gift of the Unknown, the fabulous Unknown, and we are humble for the first time. What are we to do? Tell us.

The riddle of our time is:  How could we remain so passive, when the violence is so near and so well-known in every way.  We know the perpetrators, their bank accounts, the location and operation of their greed.

Every month for the last 14 months has been the hottest on record.  The scientists who reported what weather to expect based on computer models now say that the exponential rate of climate change makes those sophisticated estimates impossible.  They are throwing away the computers and making a run for it.  Thousands of species are disappearing while flood and fire comes roaring up the valley of zombified consumers. We can't escape the prison of convenience.  The thing is, we still have the offer to participate in this apocalypse.  The Earth waits for us.

Like the tour with Neil Young last spring, we are being allowed to celebrate our radical Earth activism in a surprising new setting. In both cases, an opening was provided for us to walk out of our 99-seat storefront and shout Earthalujah! to millions. 

The storms and wildfires and floods are a daily apocalypse that we mistake for sense-surround blockbusters. The Earth's violent insistence on a new realism for its chief predator is beginning to move some of us.  But we are years away from a new "Earth Movement”.  We don't even have the most basic things all successful social movements have: hot music and scathing comedy. 

The necessary revolution is here in this extraordinary moment. Our only task is to live up to it. The Earth's 6th Extinction is not demanding a response within our quiver of desire, or our strategy, or even our reverence. It is happening, that's all. And a new Wisdom must come from us.

The Earth is quickly changing us. Everything everywhere is undergoing unprecedented change and this change sees the surfacing of the once hidden Empress of Secrets.  It is the Earth's gift in this time of apocalypse.  Silicon Valley, the Pentagon and M and M's are camouflaging the surface around us with a thick coat of dullness, but the Earth is peeling off that virtual reality.  Then she turns and looks us in the eye. In that evolution is a geo-genetic hope, the creation of new life. 

The Sunday "Earthchxrch" services remain so fulfilling, the soaring voices with their justice lyrics delivered with the 200 mph wind of recent storms. The choir sings I Go The Mountain and I'm Filled with the Fabulous Unknown from our new album. And we celebrate in this Earth Riot some of our greatest "necessary interruptions": Sister Rosetta Tharp, Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton, James Brown and Richard Strauss's Thus Spake Zarathustra. The Earth will rock our world until we don't recognize what we are doing, and then the survivors can begin again.