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Opinion From the Editor
Choose Something
Like a Star
It is no wonder that Frostiana is considered one of the greatest choral pieces ever written. Like all good poetry, it touches you in personal ways and, like all good choral songs; it wrenches emotion from the deepest part of your soul.
I sing with the Salt Lake Men’s Choir, whose fall concert this year was Frostiana—the poetry of “America’s Poet” Robert Frost set to choral music by “America’s Choral Composer” Randall Thompson. The seven songs are masterful with their word painting and movement from light to very dark, from anguish and desperation to a resolved hope. And we sounded fabulous, sharing the stage with the Utah State University Women’s Choir.
I was never very good at finding the underlying meanings of poems. AP English was, therefore, the bane of my senior year in high school. I just couldn’t read a poem about a necklace around a mariner’s neck and understand it to be a representation of Christ on the cross. Just give it to me straight out, dammit.
But, the final sentence of “Choose Something Like a Star,” the final song, rings so true to me and gives such hope that each time we sang it, my eyes brimmed and the last few words were often difficult to utter.
I would call it an updated version, similar in emotion and meaning, of the song “We Shall Overcome,” sung at nearly every civil rights march and protest. We know that, eventually, we will win. We must—we are on the right side. It’s just going to take some time to get everyone to recognize that.
When I entered gay political activism in the eighties, it may have been easier to believe the words of “We Shall Overcome,” because we knew we would. “Not in my lifetime, but maybe the next generation,” we would say.
Fast forward to today, when our rights were thrust into the spotlight like no time before; when images of gay men and lesbians around the country getting married flashed across the television sets in every American’s living room.
And the radical right responded with more vigor and venom.
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
Americans today are responding to the rhetoric of the radical right, making it look like we are losing ground in our struggle for equal civil rights. Americans are also quick to slap the “unpatriotic” label to those who question the war in Iraq. The radical right succeeded at thwarting the appointment of someone who could very well have been a moderate voice on the Supreme Court. The mob is swayed.
But the goals of social justice and peace have never moved. We must continue to look to them ... to stay our minds and be staid.
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