"Be the Resistance" by Talia Keys

Talia Keys at The Garage on Beck Street - Nov. 29th, 2018

Talia and I with the ladies in red that night at The Garage

I was watching this interview of Chris Hedges (author of the book "America: the Farewell Tour") on YouTube and the part at the end where he was talking about resistance reminded me of Talia's song ("Be the Resistance") she performed a few nights ago.  It made me cry.  I have transcribed that portion of the interview below.

Unfortunately the memory on both my phones filled up and I was unable to record Talia performing this song that night at The Garage.  I promise that as soon as I am able I will video it and post it here.

Talia Keys: http://taliakeys.com/
Talia Keys (upcoming performances): http://taliakeys.com/tour.html

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This is the full interview, almost an hour long:

YouTube (Chris Hedges): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCDd3VoAFUs

This is just the part where the talk about resistance starts:

YouTube (Resistance): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCDd3VoAFUs&t=48m15s

Chris:  Resistance entails suffering.  It requires self-sacrifice.  It accepts that we may be destroyed.  It is not rational. It is not about the pursuit of happiness, it is about the pursuit of freedom.  Resistance accepts that even if we fail, there is an inner Freedom that comes with defiance and perhaps this is the only freedom and true happiness we will ever know.

To resist evil is the highest achievement of human life.  It is the supreme act of love. It is to carry the cross, as a theologian James Cone reminds us, and to be acutely aware that what we are carrying is also what we will die upon.

Interviewer: You write so passionately about the ideal of resistance, is resistance a spiritual act?

Chris: Yes!

Interviewer:  How so?

Chris: It's an act of faith.  Because empirically everything you do in terms of resisting radical evil, as Cone called it, may show that all of your efforts have been futile.  But it doesn't invalidate resistance.  It's the belief, as Daniel Berrigan once told me, the great radical priest, that the good draws to it the good.  Even though there's nothing around us to justify that belief.  The Buddhists call it Karma.

And I think that that's true.  I think that, ah, having covered the revolutions in Eastern Europe, I saw how these great dissidents... I was in the Magic Lantern theater in Prague every night with Vaclav Havel, that you keep that other moral narrative alive.  And you don't always know who hears it, what effect it has and it's only sustainable by faith, and I don't mean in any kind of any Orthodox religiosity.

It's what Nebra (?) calls Sublime Madness, the belief that you know an act of resistance in itself confers freedom and I think that's right, even if you fail.   And it's bleak, out there.  But we can't use the word hope if we don't resist.  I have children, these corporate forces have us by the throat and they have my children by the throat.

I don't know if we're even going to survive as a species.  And we may fail.  But you know as parents we have a duty to make sure that at least our children say they tried.  And that will require forms of self-sacrifice, it will be unpleasant.  Maybe even dangerous.

It means removing our faith in established systems of power, which have proven unable to deal with the most significant challenge to human life.  Which is climate change, which was first identified as a problem in 1902 or 1905.  I mean as the world devolves, people are going to look back at us and say were we the good Germans, did we just sit there and watch the trains roll by and do nothing.  Ah, I don't want them to say that about me.

Wikipedia (James Cone): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Cone
Wikipedia (Daniel Berrigan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Berrigan
Wikipedia (VacLav Havel): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Havel