Dear Traumatized Troubadours,

The other day I was listening to a news segment on the radio where educators were discussing the traumatic effects of active-shooter drills in schools. At stake was the concern that the anxiety created by focusing on the possibility of tragedy may outweigh the advantage of preparedness. Growing up in the shadow of the Cold War when duck-and-cover was a quarterly all-school activity, I do not recall any decompression sessions when we processed the anxiety created by a preparedness drill that posited the annihilation of life on the planet. But it was a simpler time. These were the days before children were infused with psyche; our drills, like almost everything else we did, were opportunities to demonstrate our patriotism.

It was that time when religiously-themed Christmas music was giving way to holiday and winter motifs. For some reason we could not sing about the historic infant Jesus, but we could belt out verses dedicated to an imaginary Santa tumbling down our home’s exhaust system and dancing snowmen relentlessly terminated by the sun’s heat; again, no curriculum time was usurped by trauma-processing circles.

Apart from holiday songs, like duck-and-cover drills, almost every other elementary school music class was a civics lesson. One of our class’s favorites was Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is My Land. In our music books it was positioned right after Irving Berlin’s God Bless America. Years later I discovered the power of their juxtaposition. Guthrie had written his song as a rebuttal to Berlin’s, thinking God Bless America was irritating and jingoistic. In early versions of the song, the line “This land was made for you and me,” read, “God blessed America for me.” Also edited from the school version of Guthrie’s song were the stanzas protesting private property, condemning fascism and denouncing the tragedy of American poverty; evidently our simple time had been preceded by an extremely complicated time.

Speaking of complicated times, one of the other music class favorites thought to be apolitical was the seventh-inning tradition of Take Me Out to the Ball Game. The chorus is familiar, but the verses betray a far more subversive agenda. In the lyrics, penned in 1908 by Jack Norworth, a young man is courting a girl, Katie Casey. He offers to take her to the movies, but she will have none of it. Her only wish was an outing to see the emerging American pastime, baseball. As the first verse states, “She was baseball mad, had the fever and had it bad.” Except in 1908, baseball games were not attended by proper women. The scandal of Katie’s suggestion is only amplified by the knowledge that at the time of writing Take Me Out, Jack Norworth was having an affair with militant suffragette Trixie Friganza.

I’m not sure our elementary school music teacher would have been allowed to teach us this ditty had our parents known it was an anthem of first-wave feminism written to impress the author’s mistress. The fact that Norworth, who also wrote I’ve Been Making a Grandstand Play for You, did not attend a baseball game until the 1930’s was also of no consequence.

One of my mentors, Rabbi Edwin Friedman, remarked, "The way you know you’ve experienced a paradigm shift is how not only your understanding of the present, but also how you think about the past, is different." For me, having my childhood transformed from a simple to more complicated time makes it easier to live in the present.

Complicating the past to make the present more familiar, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your pastor