We are on the eve of a truly significant election. How this county will approach the Pandemic going forward, how we’ll deal with Global Warming, Systemic Racism; these are all on the ballot. We’re deciding whether character in our leaders still matters.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. A pledge totaling thirty-one words that many if not most of us first recited in grade school standing next to our desks with our hands over our hearts.

What do we mean when we end the Pledge of Allegiance with the words Liberty and Justice for All? When it comes to liberty we are a country steeped in myths of hearty individualism and personal freedom, ideas we often express loudly and boldly.

Welcome to Songs and Stories from Home. It’s October of 2020. An election is upon us, and I would urge everyone that’s eligible to register to vote and then to vote in person or by mail. What voting can do is gives us, we the people, a voice so that together we may continue to give voice to the ASPIRATIONS OF A NATION.

As we complete this journey around the fountain that celebrates the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, as we share songs and stories that bring to life what is etched in stone, I am filled with both gratitude and grief.

This Podcast is being shared at the end of September of 2020 just a few weeks before a Presidential election that will in many ways from small to significant define and decide the future and the fate of our country, of the country my grandchildren, our grandchildren, will inherit.

As I remember them now, 52 years after the facts, the ghastly murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy; two singular events woven together over decades into some once unimaginable bloodstained tapestry, complete with the fraying threads of faith and hope and love.

As this country moves in jerks and starts to define and redefine the meaning of our founding documents it’s important to know where we came from and so better understand where we are now and to give us some sense of where we might want to go from here.

On Sunday the 26th of July in 2020 Representative John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama one last time. His flag-draped casket pulled by a pair of horses rolling atop a carpet of rose petals, his family following on foot for this, his final crossing.

Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. helped define the character and the conscience of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. One grew up a street kid and the other a preacher’s kid. They both became ministers giving voice to a moment with words that echo down the corridors of time and resonate to this day.