It's Music - Not Football, Soccer, or Even Politics - That Will Change the World!

On this first day of 2010, I woke up to Mary Jasch's pointer to this vid and I simply have to share it here.

Throughout the holidays, I've found myself in one conversation after another with the theme, "How can I change things?" "How can WE change things?" "What can little ME do to make the world a better place... NOW?"

Amongst my friends and neighbors, there's a deep sense of sadness and disappointment about the failure of our American political process to permit the profound C-H-A-N-G-E that we hoped our President would be leading in 2009. We're disappointed all the way to the core when we hear the partisan wrangling and finger pointing going on in Washington and spreading across the country, on the airwaves and in whatever those things were called "Town Hall Meetings." We're saddened down to the soles of our feet that our countrymen and women are spending their energy fighting when everywhere people are suffering - more everyday.

This is not the way we want to feel. This is not the way we want to live. And it doesn't have to be this way!

Jose Abreu is blazing a pathway across Venezuela, where one-by-one, joining their passions in the service of something greater than any one individual could create alone, young people of all classes, all races, and all religions are using music to make profound change in their personal lives, their families, their communities, their nation. Not with political debates. Not with gladiator sports competitions. With orchestras.

Please take 17 minutes out of the non-stop stream of football games this New Year's Day and watch this inspirational talk Mr. Abreu made at TED. He is the authentic Music Man. And he has changed the course of history in his country simply by sharing his passion for music.

Youth orchestra performances create something entirely different than youth sports competitions, don't they? How obvious. What a tremendous way to raise the entire consciousness of a nation. How have we missed this? How utterly wonderful of Mr. Abreu to point out the obvious with such grace and dignity. And tenacity.

I'm not a musician. I wish I were. I didn't get the support I needed as a young person to learn to love the discipline of playing an instrument with others. A few years ago, I did get the support I needed from the beautiful Susan Lincoln, in Austin, Texas, to use my voice as an instrument of love. Through Susan's Hilde Girls training, I learned to chant the compositions of Hildegard of Bingen and to join my voice with other women's voices to generate a "bath" of joyous sound that brought deep healing and satisfaction to us as participants and to others as listeners, too. To say that my experience in Hilde Girls brought me profound personal healing doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the value I received from participating. It gave me nothing less than the ownership of my own voice.

We can use the profound lesson Mr. Abreu is teaching in his TED talk to start turning things around in each of our communities. With choruses and local orchestras. Come on, let's do it!