Precious Dream song by Todd – Under The Table

October 17. Today is my birthday. I am seventy-six.

When I was born in 1949 there were not yet credit cards. For much of my life there were no such things as personal computers or mobile phones or the Internet, yet we somehow managed to communicate with each other. You could travel to thousands of small towns all over America on spacious Greyhound buses for very little money, and I did lots of that.

When I was an aspiring young writer, the only way to make multiple copies of the stories I wrote was to type the story on a piece of typing paper atop a piece of carbon paper atop another piece of paper. If I made a typo, the error could only be effectively corrected by re-typing the entire page again. The quality of the copies was lousy at best. I believe this is why so few people aspired to be writers.

The first photocopy shops opened in the early 1970s, after which a few more people decided to try to be writers. With the advent of personal computers and laser printers in the 1980s, almost everyone who could sort of write decided to try to be a writer. Today we have Artificial Intelligence capable of writing prose that almost no one can distinguish from prose written by really good actual writers.

I have a tradition of asking people on their birthdays if they have any words of wisdom they would like to share. Here is my answer to that question for this year.

Donald Trump, who somehow became President of the United States, not once but twice, really wants to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. I think this is a wonderful goal for him to have. Here are the eight things he needs to do in order to win the prize.

1. Remove all American military personnel from all cities, American and foreign.

2. Cut the defense budget by fifty percent and spend that 700 billion dollars a year to fund universal healthcare from birth to grave and free education from nursery school through graduate school for everyone in America.

3. Build high-speed electric trains connecting all major urban areas to greatly reduce the need for jet travel, which is the largest contributor to global warming.

4. Phase out the use of fossil fuels by creating a solar power system providing more than enough power for everyone and everything in the country.

5. Make producing and selling weapons of any kind illegal.

6. Hire kind, intelligent, well-educated, non-sexist, non-racist people to run the various arms of government.

7. Nominate intelligent non-sexist non-racist people to be our judges.

8. Dedicate the rest of his life to helping the poor and disenfranchised of the world.

If Donald Trump will do these eight things, I’m sure he will win the Nobel Peace Prize, and he’ll probably win more than once.

fin

Precious Dream from Todd and Marcia’s album So Not Jazz

The 2024 election is over. Donald Trump won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College totals and will be the next President of the United States. And what first came to mind when I woke into this new reality was that when I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty I was deeply involved in the anti-war movement (The Vietnam War), and had I been a college student in 2024 I would surely have been among those protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. And though I’m Jewish, I would never have voted for anyone supporting Israel’s crime against humanity.

I doubt Trump won because of Kamala Harris’s solidarity with Biden in supporting the Israeli slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless people, but I do feel there is a karmic connection to that ongoing genocide and Harris’s loss.

In my musings this morning about the election, I was reminded of something I wrote and posted five years ago when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for President. I thought I’d include that post herein, recalling that it was the strategy of the Democratic Party to make sure Bernie did not win the nomination for President.

May 2, 2020

Bernie and Precious Dream

I’m voting for Bernie Sanders and contributing to his campaign because he is the second person in my lifetime (Jimmy Carter the first) who wants what I want for our society and the world and has a chance, however slim, of becoming President of the United States. I hope you vote for him, too.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a song called ‘Precious Dream’. Marcia and I recorded the song on our CD So Not Jazz ten years ago. When the CD came out, we gave some concerts and ended each of our shows with a performance of ‘Precious Dream’.

Many people said the song would make a good campaign song for a dream candidate yet to materialize. And now Bernie Sanders has materialized and here’s hoping our precious dream can at least start to come true.

You can hear our rendition of ‘Precious Dream’ on YouTube.

Precious Dream

Last night I had a precious dream, dreamt I woke into the dawn,

walked out of my little cottage, found a newspaper on the lawn

When I picked up that morning tribune

it opened to the very front page

and the headlines they told me

it was the dawning of a brand new age

Yeah the rich folks had all decided

to share their money with the poor

and the leaders had disbanded all the armies,

not another dollar to be spent on war.

They’d stopped building prisons,

put that money in our schools and neighborhoods

and instead of building bombs and things we don’t need

we were all of us working for the greater good

Yes they stopped clear-cutting the forests,

killing all the animals,

stopped dumping poison in the ground

and the rivers and the sea.

Oh the cars ran clean, trains ran smooth and fast,

the air was clear,

food and shelter, health-care guaranteed

And the movies were about fascinating people

with real problems, you know, the real stuff

and our heroes were bright and generous,

pioneers of truth and love

When I woke up, my heart was pounding,

and I prayed my dream had all come true,

but I knew as well as you do

that that’s really up to me and you

Yes, we have it in our power to change the way we live

we have it in our power to take no more than we give

we have it in our power to love instead of hate

we have it in our power to make these changes

before it’s all too late

fin