Yeah, but... Thursday nights at the Fifth String (a folk instrument store) in Berkeley a dozen or so of good pickers, fiddlers, pluckers, singers, etc., get together and play: lots of fiddle tunes, bluegrass ballads, gospel songs, etc. Nothing remotely political unless I bring it. I introduced a song I wrote about the threat to resume bombing in Iraq; we played it, lots of nice breaks, I sang it, people said "nice song, Charlie." Then on to the Redhaired Boy or Cabin on the Hill. A few weeks earlier I chose as my song Joe McDonald's "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag." One person knew it, said "Jeez, I haven't played that one for twenty years." On to "The Great Speckled Bird" or something. Pretty much the same with the people I play with regularly: sometimes called the Point Isabel Poodle Players (a couple of our members have poodles--I met them at the dog park, we've been playing weekly ever since). I've suggested other names: "Bond and the Bail Jumpers" and "the Born-Once Gospel Singers." The group has grown from three to now seven or eight. They said they liked my song, and we play it every now and then, then we go back to "Free Grace," a medley of "Cripple-Creek" and "Old Joe Clark," "I'll Fly Away," etc. One of our members is an anti-death penalty activist but the closest thing we do to a song on that theme is "The Green Green Grass of Home." If we do "This Land is Your Land," I have to jump in to keep the song from ending without the one verse that tells what the song is really about: "As I was walkin' that ribbon of highway, I came to a sign that said "Private Property, but on the other side, it didn't say nothin', this land is made for you and me." I don't know why I'm rambling on but I just feel nobody much gives a damn, despite starving children in Iraq, U.S. backed genocide in East Timor, revelations of the use of depleted uranium shells in Iraq and their likely relationship to Gulf War Syndrome, not to mention the high rate of exotic cancers among the children of southern Iraq, Cia crack in Los Angeles, the possible use of sarin gas against possible deserters in Vietnam, decades of support of death squads in Central America, on and on, and "Where's the outrage?"