For Pete's Sake...

I listened to a program today on KGNU on Pete Seeger, folk singer and banjo player extrordinaire. Pete died about a year ago; he was born in 1919.

What's so extra ordinary about Pete? Many things: he had been a student at Harvard; his dad Charles S. had been a professor of classical music at one of the California universities; he knew, traveled and played with Woody Guthrie; and he had a heart for the struggling working classes of our country during a time when few others did.

Pete's banjo playing was fabulous - he performed in Carnegie Hall many times. He played many of the old-time folk ballads like John Henry, songs of protest and struggle. He sang about how the company thugs beat and killed union organizers in the 1930's before the Wagner Act of 1936 made strikes, unions and collective bargaining legal.

An aside... if it's illegal to form unions and strike, are you a lawbreaker if you engage in this activity so as to gain a living wage for your family and minimal work condition protection for yourself?

Was it illegal for Martin Luther King and his followers to stage sit-downs and mass protests to draw attention to abuse, ill-treatment, segregation and discrimination, even though the law prohibited this? (King himself was arrested for "participating in a parade without a license.")

Was Mohandas Ghandi violating British Imperial law by exercising civil disobedience against the British Empire to try to gain rightful independence for his country of India in the 1950's?

Even more poignant, was Rev. Dietrich Bonhoeffer breaking German and even moral law when he participated in a plot to murder Adolph Hitler?

Is it right to break and or protest what you consider to be an unjust law? IS there a higher law?

Traveling the rails with Guthrie, Seeger became radicalized by what he saw during the Depression. Charles Seeger had worked with the IWW in the early 1900's.

Both Guthrie and Seeger leaned left in their politics - hard. They had Communist sympathies, as did many during the tough Depression years. The Commies offered something.

But when prosperity returned after WWII, the tide turned against Seeger and most leftists. The House Un-American Activities Committee under Joe McCarthy persecuted him and others. Pete was consequently blacklisted and had great difficulty securing work for a long time after that. Guthrie died in the 1960's.

The powerful hold the purse strings, the police and military might, the political clout and the media. According to Reinhold Niebuhr, the only way to counter force is with force.