What's it gonna take?
How many lives?
How many voices left unheard?
How many years?
How many tears,
Until the ones in power hear the word.1
Last weekend I had the privilege of standing on stage at the 2008 Concert for Lost Voices with some of the finest folk and blues musicians in the world - Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Peter "Madcat" Ruth, the Unity of Ann Arbor Women's Ensemble, Guys With Guitars, and Cliff Gracey - making music for hundreds of people in my back yard and on boats across the lake.
And now here I am a week later. The chairs are gone, the sound equipment has been packed off to another gig, and the Scottie's Potties have been hauled away. As the lingering aromas of patchouli and Zingerman's beef brisket dissipate into the air over the lake, I am still staggering around the yard, cleaning the last few empty Dasani bottles and dazed ex-hippies out from behind the hot tub.
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Not too long ago the Sci Fi Channel produced a TV special, called "Countdown To Doomsday" in which experts consider ten really crappy ways human civilization might come to an end. Possibilities include invasion by aliens (I think they mean the kind that likes to abduct and conduct experiments on the residents of trailer parks in Alabama, rather than the housekeeping staff from the Red Roof Inn), getting into a cosmic fender-bender with an uninsured giant meteorite, or becoming slaves to a generation of ruthless futuristic killer robots – not including the one who is currently the Governator of California.
Despite the Sci Fi Channel's credentials as an unimpeachable scholarly institution, and even though the possibilities they present are pretty darned scary, I think they've overlooked one of the most significant dangers facing our world today. I refer, of course, to Sudden Catastrophic Loss of Cellular, or SCLOC (pronounced, "SCLOC").
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The teenaged boy sits in a green resin chair across the stage from me, on the other side of a circle of nine teenaged boys in green resin chairs. The stage lights of the otherwise empty theater bathe us all in a warm glow, here in this maximum-security juvenile detention facility.
His name is "Dallas." His blue shirt means that he is "transitional," getting toward the end of his sentence. If all goes well and his judge agrees, he could be out in a few weeks or months, tackling the next challenge in his journey back into our world.
I first met Dallas more than two years ago, in one of the first incarnations of the roots music-writing programs that have come to be known as Lost Voices. We were sitting on this same stage, in these same chairs. He wore a yellow shirt then, signifying among other things that he was going to remain locked up for the foreseeable future.
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