Every year, as the calendar turns to its final page, chill winds fill the air and Christmas songs fill the airwaves. In among the ho ho hos and jingle bells there is a voice from the past, a reminder that the future is in our hands if we want it badly enough to claim it. It is the voice of John Lennon, singing his wonderful holiday anthem Happy Xmas/War Is Over.
It is a voice that still, years after his death, carries so much power and weight that in the dark days after September 11, 2001, while some corporate toadies were secretly listening in on our voices, others were silencing his. Companies like Clear Channel found John's music too controversial to play, while pro-war junk by hacks like Toby Keith was not.
I wonder if anybody not my age can understand just what John Lennon and the Beatles meant in the world I grew up in; I simply had never known a world without them.
I watched them, I'm told, on the Ed Sullivan show that night so soon after John Kennedy was killed in Dallas. I remember neither event; I was about 2 and a half years old. I grew up when the Beatles were the biggest thing in the world. Hell, they were bigger than it was.
For most of us the biggest of them all was John.
It was not merely his music, though he was one of the finest and most important musicians of the twentieth century. He was a fine writer with a cutting wit. His commitment to peace and his long, successful struggle for U.S. residency against the attack dogs of the Nixon administration was the stuff of legend. Even that memorable week he and Yoko Ono spent co-hosting the Mike Douglas Show was a hoot.
His re-emergence after years of self-imposed exile from politics and the music scene, simply to spend time with his family instead, had only added to his stature. He was the man most of us, in our wildest dreams, wished we could be.
I was nineteen years old on that dark night of December 8, 2000. It was the final day of classes for the fall semester. I went out drinking with classmates and came home after eleven o’clock. The names and faces of that night are long forgotten. I don’t remember how I got home. Unfortunately, it wasn't the drink that stole those memories; they simply shrank to insignificance compared to what happened next.
I turned on the television to see the end of the Monday Night Football game between New England and Miami. The first thing I heard was the gravelly voice of Howard Cosell, his stentorian tone more somber than usual as he spoke the unspeakable news: John Lennon was dead, shot four times and killed in front of his home in New York.
Reaction was immediate. Crowds gathered in front of John's home and the hospital where he was pronounced dead. They lit candles and sang his songs. "All we are saying," they sang again and again and again, "is give peace a chance..."
The anniversary is not so widely commemorated now; it's been twenty-seven years after all and we can't expect to remember every single one. Now it will be the five year or ten year anniversary blocks the get attention, till sometime around 2030 or so that will even stop.
Perhaps that's as it should be. A life so full of meaning should not be overshadows forever by such a meaningless death.
It's not hard to imagine how John would have spent the last six years if he were still with us.
Like many other artists he'd have done his bit to help bind up the searing wounds of the adopted city he loved; who knows, maybe even with a little help from his friends.
But I doubt that horrible day would have undermined John's commitment to peace. He'd have been among the skeptics as George W. Bush greased the skids for war. He'd have spoken out as always, against Bush's destructive invasion of Iraq, against the abuses of the Patriot Act, against domestic spying, against the crimes of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.
John never fancied himself a leader, though of course he was. He called on us to think and act for ourselves, something that today as then far too few of us do.
He was a poet and an artist and an activist; a soldier for peace if you like, who fought with his voice instead of a gun.
And this year I propose we make that voice heard as widely as possible.
When the clock strikes midnight this Christmas I plan to be Downtown in front of the Federal Building with a candle, my iPod and a station, playing John's songs.
Happy XMas/War is Over; Give Peace a Chance; Power to the People; maybe I'll throw in a little Marvin Gaye too. I think What's Going On and Mercy Mercy Me would fit in quite nicely.
You may say I'm a dreamer, but imagine hundreds or thousands of us, in front of Federal offices, military recruitment centers, maybe even the White House if you happen to live in D.C., taking a few minutes to play our songs for peace before heading back home to the warmth of our families.
I hope some of you join me.