This song and talk is from the “Good Trouble” rally in Northborough, Massachusetts on July 17 2025.

Also a reminder that I will be doing a special live stream concert tonight (Wednesday, July 23) at 8PM EDT in my usual places. The theme is “In Our Hands - Holding Peace in Divided Times”.

YouTube Channel

I am waiting in the silence

It's been about 60 years since the first time I marched with a civil rights march in 1965 in Rochester, New York. I've been doing this for a long time. And I was in the Army. Okay, thank you for your service. And I played with the Paul Winter Consort for years.

I've been an environmental activist for years, and I'm often out with the marches. And I've got the battery-powered speakers, which is kind of like having a pickup truck. You know, everybody asks you.

So here's what I think. It's great to get out here and everybody vent and, you know, what just happened? What a terrible thing! And we're going to vent and show our anger. Yeah, we've got to hold the line. But we have to be careful to not become us and them.

There are people driving by, I'll bet, who think we're them already. We're defined by the opposition. And we've got to make sure that doesn't happen.

We can be teachers and we can be diplomats. It's not easy at all of course what we got to do in the next 16 months. A little less than 473 days we have to change the Congress. That's our job, I think, right now. And we've got to be teachers. Yes, enrolling new voters, that's one thing. But talking to the person that you didn't want to relate to, you know? That uncle. Okay, we'll still let you live in the attic, but you've got to talk. You know what I mean.

This is no fun. It's slow. It seems like you'll never get anywhere, but it works. I heard an actor playing a diplomat on the radio, I mean, in a movie. I'll bet you saw the movie too, I can't remember. And he says, diplomacy, it never works, doesn't work, never works, doesn't work, until it does.

That's it. This is possible. You know, we ended slavery. We got the eight-hour day. We stopped the hole in the ozone layer, things like that. These things, this can be done. We've got an onslaught now like we never thought we'd have. We never thought we'd have to do this, but we do.

So thanks for listening to that.

Here’s a singalong that I led during the rally. We need to be singing and hoping together.