I’d like to teach the world to sing

From the Chicago Tribune

President Donald Trump uttered a single word on Tuesday that perfectly framed the slaughter that targeted Ariana Grande concertgoers in Manchester, England: Evil. That’s the word that the president brandished to describe the suicide bomber who packed his explosive, and timed his attack, to inflict mortal damage on the young concertgoers, many of them in their early teens. “So many young, beautiful, innocent people living and enjoying their lives, murdered by evil losers,” Trump said.

It is the perfect characterization of this attack. Elemental. A thunderbolt with sharp edges and no doubt about its accuracy. Look at the photos of those young girls, bloodied, shrieking, screaming for their parents. The word fits.

The evil that lurked in the Manchester bomber is the same that motivated a cell of terrorists who murdered scores of people in Paris, or the one who rampaged through an Orlando nightclub, or those who set off explosions in Boston and Brussels, or rammed a truck into crowds of celebrants on Bastille Day in Nice, France … The list goes on. And the next plots are already taking shape. For many parents the understandable impulse may be to downplay the danger, lest their child grow anxious. Could it happen here? The truth is not comforting. How to explain evil, not the garden-variety kind but the capital E kind practiced by ISIS, the kind that doesn’t view innocent civilians as collateral damage but as soft targets to be exploited to pile up a maximum death toll?

Scientists have long tried to trace the genesis of human evil, to fathom the unfathomable. What role, for instance, does childhood trauma play? Bad parenting? Religious indoctrination or, conversely, a religious void? Genetics? What researchers know is that many people share similar experiences and genetic traits but don’t become terrorists, don’t commit heinous acts of evil.

Years ago in a symposium titled “Understanding Evil,” a group of psychiatrists, authors and professional evil-studiers gathered in Texas. They invoked the touchstones of evil, and named names from Hitler to Manson, Stalin to Pol Pot. They talked about slavery. Child abuse. Bullies. The Inquisition. One intriguing thought came from then-Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis, who explained evil’s seductive appeal. “Evil accepts us,” he said. “It does not require us to improve no matter how great our faults. You are what you are, evil says, and in fact if you want to, you can go ahead and be worse.”

Some people may shrink from this word because they’ve been taught that no one is pure evil, just as no one is pure good. That people do things for complicated reasons. But evil is the right word to describe the Manchester bombing. It should be wielded like a dagger every time a terrorist strikes. You don’t need to know the bomber’s name or his twisted spiel or whether he did this for the greater glory of Islamic State. Trump said he wouldn’t empower terrorists by labeling them “monsters because they would like that term, they would think that is a great name. I will call them, from now on, losers, because that’s what they are: They’re losers.”

We don’t care to calculate how this evil stacks up against other terror acts, other atrocities, greater tolls of wars and genocides. Every act of evil, no matter the death toll, is equivalent at its merciless core. Today, parents in Manchester mourn their dead. Tomorrow, we hope, ISIS will mourn theirs.

If you want to see me ugly cry, just play a flash mob video. OK, you don’t really want to see me ugly cry, trust me, but it is true that I am a complete sucker for anything that involves two or more people coming together to create something that they could not possibly do alone. I think the raw synergy of a large group joining in seemingly random fashion just sends me over the edge. The iconic Coke commercial and the Whos of Whoville are my childhood examples of this idea. The Coke song gives me chills every time I hear it.

My music background surely plays a big role in my obsession. I took piano as a child and, though I was actually quite good, I hated practicing so my parents allowed me to give it up. I wish I had stuck with the lessons, but that early experience of putting different notes together and creating a richer whole has stayed with me over the years.

I was in chorus in high school and quickly adapted to the sensation of voices melding together in a way that I could feel at my core. It didn’t hurt that my chorus teacher, Judy Pritchett, was one of the best in the state. If there was ever a woman who could take a bunch of high school ne’er do wells and turn them into a band of angels, it was Ms. Pritchett. Being a small piece of that greater whole had a profound effect on my sense of cooperation among my peers. We learned to come together in a most beautiful way, in spite of any differences between us.

In college I went through my “acoustic girl band” phase with my friend Stacy Bence. We spent hours on the porch of our dorm, picking out our favorite songs on her guitar and my mandolin, fine-tuning our vocal harmonies to the point that our dorm mates and the occasional small crowd at the coffee shop or Schroeder’s courtyard could actually enjoy hearing, or at least pretend to.

Towards the end of college there was the “blues/rock band lead singer” phase that added amplification and intense rhythm to the process. Talk about feeling something at your core! I know that my ears appreciate the fact that this was a short phase that ended with the decision to head to the woods and hike the Appalachian Trail, which is a whole other story for another time.

As an adult I returned to my choral roots with a long stint in the church choir, bringing me back to the harmonious joining of many voices, MONICA SHEPPARD Steve Sack, The Minneapolis Star Tribune Clay Bennett, Chattanooga Times Free Press and to my point in this piece, synergy.

The word “synergy” derives from the Greek words “sun,” meaning together, and “ergon,” meaning work. “Sunergos” became their word for working together, morphing to “synergy” by the mid-19th century.

I know this could sound like a repeat of my thoughts on a beehive community of a couple of weeks ago, but the buzz I wish to address here is the buzz of harmony/synergy/togetherness that occurs when you are hitting a chord with one or more others.

This week I have had the joy of watching two friends realize a work synergy that will result in far greater things than either of them could accomplish alone. Their synergy has nothing to do with musical notes or audible harmony, but instead the buzz that they and anyone around them can feel at their core for the potential; the electricity of ideas dovetailing, of goals merging.

On Saturday, Rome High School principal, Dr. Phillip Brown, talked about the cooperation that he has seen in the 2017 graduating class. It is one of the largest and most successful classes to graduate in RHS history. Brown noted the fact that they actually seem to all like each other as a possible reason for their collective success. Isn’t that an interesting thing to consider? We do not live in a time that fosters cooperation. We are lead in the news and on social media to polarize at every turn. We pick sides based on simple terms rather than looking at the nuances that could allow us to cross the divides. We plant our feet firmly on the hill we intend to die on, rather than listening and learning from each other in ways that would easily level the terrain between us.

What can we do to change this polarized trend? Should we invite Ms. Pritchett to teach us a song or two? (I bet she would.) Or should we simply work towards listening; towards hearing each other? Could we then give up on settling for a divided and monotonous drone and instead appreciate the very differences that allow us to create a rich harmony together?

I don’t know about you, but I like the sound of that.

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