I know only one other guy named Arlo. & he couldn't be futher from the folkslinger. He's a prison guard. Had two boys. beats his wife. ntm: his wifes a prison guard. when there two young sons were growing up, they'd come home from work, and NOT TAKE OFF thier uniforms. Telling the boys, do this do that. And they beat they're kids when they wern't beating up each other...

Just coinsodentially, from the abuse, the two boys, now grown men, are both in prison , after many a stint in the county jail... Institutionalized they call it... funny how such a rare name, can come at two differant pt.s of light?

Look it up in the phone book. I kid you not. I won't mention the last name. but it's in my hometown of Ogdensburg NY... There's only one Arlo....

I did a yr. bid with Arlo's son... ( the mean Arlo that lives here ) and he was a really nice guy. Poured his soul out to me. It made me realize what a normal upbringing I had had....

When I got outta jail ( 1991 ) I vowed to leave all the inmates I met behind me. They were my friends, while incarcerated, but after I got out, I thought, better leave them behind.....

Arlo's son came to visit me. I kept it short & sweet. Two days later, he got into a fight with his girlfriend ( drunk & stoned ) and someone called the cops.... Funny I forget this kids name. I was 31 he was 21... anyhow, he pulled a knife on the cop, and the cop shot him twice in the chest, with a 357 smith and wessen... The dude lived, has the scars to prove it... and I forgot what he did to get his latest bid. I try not to keep up with that kinda stuff....

Prison guards. ( state CO's) in my experience are bastards.... County CO's are like 4H camp instructors....

Just my experience...

I didn't mean to taint Arlo's first name... The story is what it is...

RB

One of the hard jobs in life is to swallow the karma of our parents whole to stop it in one generation. It is the hardest and most important thing we do for our culture.

When we moved off the mountain into the valley, we were moving into the first and only house my parents would own and raise their His Hers and Ours brood. My younger brother and I were the Ours in a family with eleven kids. All the families were blue collar and living in a development replacing the sharecropper families who grew cotton on that land. Scattered around us were the paintless shacks with wood stoves and mudded newspaper stuck in cracks in the walls. We were better off though at harvest we'd work with them picking cotton for spare change because better off is relative. We were dirt poor but it was country, it was the South and it wasn't unhappy. When no one else has more, it's relative. On the other side of town, it was all about the Space program so there was plenty of excitement. I would not realize we were poor until I hit high school.

When they began to tear down the ghettos in the downtown, they bought up the homes around us. The white engineers who had come from all over the world fled en masse. We stayed. When the first black family was moved onto our street, the kids were curious. The fellow was a degreed engineer, well-spoken, polite and enjoyed talking to the kids playing on the street. Dad came home from work and saw me with a group of kids talking to him. He called me home.

He beat me.

I love my father. He gave me music. He taught me Oklahoma Hills. We jammed at his house on every holiday. When his childhood friend, a black guy whom he managed to get a better house than ours across the street died, he died in Dad's arms in the front yard of that house. These men had gone to WWII together, respected each other, and looked after each other's families. My Mom looked after his widow until the widow died. Mom still lives in that house refusing to give up the home he built for her. When my Father died there, my brothers and I sat in the next room and played all of his songs for three hours. When we stopped, he passed five minutes later.

To this day, I can't forget that beating. All I can say is that movements follow movements and outrage becomes its own reward. If the spirit of the universe is in us, it gives us the strength to absorb the beating and not pass it on. My children who were raised with black children do not hate and barely notice. That was Martin Luther King's dream. We made it come true by availing ourselves of the infinite power of love, compassion, tolerance and self-restraint. It is not heroic. It is ours to do.

As Edward R Murrow said, "Hoe to the end of the row."

Ya'll have some interesting stories there. It's a shame how Arlo's son got treated. So sorry you dad beat you for that. You did nothing wrong. The south was so dumb back in the segregation days. So sad...

THe south is just a place and people are just people. Those people from then are no different than you or me! It is their concept of reality that you find objectionable! It is very difficult to change deep veined traditions, superstitions and "culture" even when it is obviously objectionable behavior!
and
I don't believe there is anything such as karma myself. Biology is full of feedback loops to deal with historical conditions that lead to excesses and we need to activate and modify some feedback loops at this point in history to ensure we are the primitives of the future!

Of course that is just my own personal insanity (or concept of reality) talking!

how ya gonna keep'em
down on the farm
after they see the big city
da da da da da
da dadada
da da da da da da
da doooee dat

Feedback and friction, context, these are Karma. It isn't mystical. It's physics. But we are not slaves to that. Dharma, duty, the sense of right and wrong, what is just, this is uniquely human in my opinion. We are able by free will and action to manage karma, to evolve for the greater good into the higher being. So I say, ours to do.

My Dad's generation got farther than his father's. He went to war and saw a much larger and different world. He hated the Japanese to the day he died. I have his Type 99 which is another story. He could only go so far. The rage he felt the day he took a belt to me was that his world was no longer in his control. It was being forced on him. He didn't hate blacks. He was raised with blacks and worked beside them. He hated the Japanese for the atrocities he saw at Guam and Iwo. Worse, the American troops committed them too. Halsey ordered it. The version you see on the World At War is sanitized. They machine gunned them in the water and turned ships guns on them. It was viciousness at scale.

But they came home crazy and it took a long time to get over that. Some had a very hard time making the adjustments and so it went. Society marched on. People marched in the streets. I bought into the ideals of Arlo and Pete. He bought into the songs of Woody and Jack. We shared the music but our stories were different. The needs of our times were different. Feedback loop piles on feedback loop but reality is the story of certain moments. There are many of those moments for me and each one reveals a change of heart, opinion and perspective but some reveal conscious decisions to give a damm and make a difference so my kids wouldn't inherit what I could not escape, only manage. To serve a greater good is a better life. It can mean a beating. It's not free. I only have to look at my children today to know the price was not too high. As the Buddha said, "Life is suffering", and that is not an indictment. It is the call to act.

We each get one life, one row to hoe. Hoe to the end of the row. Do that and the greater good is served. Do that and in my way of thinking, there is nothing to apologize for to whatever awaits us on the other side.

Meanwhile, there is good music, a soft power that can be passed along mother and father to son and daughter, teaching what we learned, what we believed and what we saw. We can be fair witnesses in the human hall of dreams, here, elsewhere and for generations to come. That is, in my humble opinion, what folk music is and does best.

And... do it well and it gets you laid.

Sing along with me :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyU69gIG4sg


Glad whe have music to join people .

from my perspective...alice's adventures in wonderland and through the looking glass are the closest comparison to my observation as i have ever read in a book!