Bob Dylan on celebrity and the good life
Bob Dylan writes about life in the tumultuous late 60s, a time of such great political and social unrest, with many considering him the face and the voice of an angst-filled generation. Having moved with his family to the small town of Woodstock, his life as a celebrity had become an unwanted burden. It’s a good dose of reality for those who hunger and thirst for power and fame. The good life is found not in the bright lights, Dylan would suggest, but instead among family and good friends, cultivating faithfulness, putting down roots.
Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race. Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on. Outside of my family, nothing held any real interest for me and I was seeing everything through different glasses. Even the horrifying news items of the day, the gunning down of the Kennedys, King, Malcolm X... I didn’t see them as leaders being shot down, but rather as fathers whose families had been left wounded. Being born and raised in America, the country of freedom and independence, I had always cherished the values and ideals of equality and liberty. I was determined to raise my children with those ideals...
As far as I knew, I didn’t belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the big bugs in the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman, or even conscience of a generation. That was funny. All I’d ever done was sing songs that were dead straight and expressed powerful new realities. I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of...
People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. I found myself stuck in Woodstock, vulnerable and with a family to protect. If you looked in the press, though, you saw me being portrayed as anything but that. It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat -- someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me. I wasn’t a preacher performing miracles. It would have driven anybody mad...
I don’t know what everybody else was fantasizing about but what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. That would have been nice. That was my deepest dream. After a while you learn that privacy is something you can sell, but you can’t buy it back.
From Chronicles: Volume One (Simon & Schuster), pp. 114-118.
Wes Moore and the question of ‘the other’
Another of the books I picked up at bargain prices in the waning hours of Borders’ existence was The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates. I first saw the book last winter on the front display table at the massive Barnes & Noble in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. It’s a bestseller, so you may already know about it, but in case you’re unacquainted it’s the story of two guys with the same name, both from Baltimore, both raised by single mothers, both African-American. But their lives have turned out drastically differently, and it’s essentially an exploration of the whys behind that. Rather than summarize the story, which really deserves to be read all the way through, I’ll just make a couple of comments about the thoughts that have stuck with me since reading it.
The title intrigues me. The Other Wes Moore is written by Wes Moore, the businessman, Army veteran, TV commentator, White House Fellow, and Rhodes Scholar. So maybe the title refers to the other Wes Moore, who is currently serving a life sentence for murder. But I’m not sure. Could Wes Moore the author be saying that he himself is really the other, the exception to the rule? Perhaps; the ambiguity may be intentional.
The book also brings to mind the tired right-left debates over whether one’s social environment or one's family upbringing is to blame for such ills as poverty and violent crime in America's cities. There are those who’d contend that the environment of the inner city serves to condition (condemn?) children like these Wes Moores to become criminals and unproductive members of society. Meanwhile others argue that it’s the breakdown of the nuclear family that’s to blame; the lack of a father figure in the lives of both Wes Moores and so many others is the defining factor in their lives. I happen to think it’s more of a both/and -- the crushing environment of the inner city and the lack of family cohesiveness mutually enforce each other (for what it’s worth, John Perkins, whose words matter a great deal more than mine, shares this integrated view). More than anything, I think the either/or, right/left approach to these questions may get plenty of people fired up, but in the end it leaves the situation in inner cities mostly unchanged.
So what conclusion does he come to at the end of the book? Why did his story turn out so much differently than that of the other Wes Moore? He knows better than to boil it down to a formula, to a few simple steps. Real life doesn’t work that way. But what he does show is that when given a second chance, and maybe a third and a fourth and a fifth, boys like him might just become men who make their mothers proud. And he shows that for others, sometimes all it takes is a moment to derail things forever.
I think the book is important for his honest, first-person portrayal of the kind of life so many of us haven’t experienced but are quick to diagnose. And more than anything, it’s important for the empathy and compassion with which Wes Moore writes, reminding me and all of us that there, but for the grace of God, go I.
‘Seek Social Justice’ (Part Two)
[Part 2 of 6 in my review of the Seek Social Justice study from the Heritage Foundation and WORLD Magazine]
The second section of the study is called Cultivating Justice from the Ground Up: Marriage, Family, and Friendship. To set the stage for making a strong case for the importance of solid, loving, nuclear family structures, a couple of heart-breaking statistics are presented:
“Roughly 80 percent of all long-term poverty occurs in single-parent homes.�
“Nearly four in 10 children are born to single mothers. Seven out of 10 black children are born to an unwed mother. These children are seven times more likely to experience poverty than those born and raised in a home with their married parents.�
From the perspective of the study, these statistics seem to indicate a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship: broken families cause poverty. It’s impossible to deny the correlation, I’d say, but I’m hesitant to read into those statistics a simple, one-way causal relationship. Isn’t it also likely that poverty breaks down relationships? And couldn’t there be some deeper, more systemic reasons why certain demographics tend to be poorer than others? Are broken families really the underlying determining factor? Again, I don’t deny a correlation; I just hesitate to arrive too quickly at causality.
Nonetheless, the study hits the nail on the head in emphasizing that in order to address the breakdown of families, we as Christians and neighbors will need to “roll up our sleeves� and get personally involved. Family issues, after all, are best addressed at family and relational levels. I think of Donald Miller’s organization, The Mentoring Project, and the excellent work they are doing in response to the needs of a fatherless generation.
Rudy Carrasco, former executive director of Harambee Christian Family Center in Pasadena, says in the video, “The family is an integral part of social justice because it is the starting point of social justice.� And I have to admit, the authors of this study make a very compelling case. When you consider that there are parts of the United States where kids grow up without witnessing any healthy marriages, and then think about the way marriage is cheapened on TV and in Hollywood, it strikes you as both tragic and inevitable that the cycle of family brokenness would continue unabated.
A year and a half ago, we had a guest join our family for Thanksgiving. He was living at the local rescue mission, part of a rehabilitation program there, and my uncle had begun mentoring him. After spending several hours with our family, he told my uncle with tears in his eyes that he had never, in fifty years, been around a family that really loved each other.
Families and communities really do shape who we become as men and women, husbands and wives, parents and neighbors. The “horizons of the possible� are either broad or quite contracted depending on what we have seen and experienced. It seems to me that a truly Christian understanding of abundant life can’t minimize the role of the family in helping people to thrive, to help create an environment where human flourishing can happen.
I think the study does an excellent job at highlighting the family as an all-too-often ignored factor in social justice. 
In the book of James we learn that real religion has to do with caring for orphans and widows. Personally, I have tended to focus on the sociopolitical side of this - orphans and widows represent those who are particularly vulnerable to abuse by the powerful, which I still absolutely believe to be true - but I admittedly haven’t paid enough attention to the significant family implications in their situation.
Not too long ago I read an excellent compilation of essays called The Justice Project. An acquaintance of mine, Ruth Padilla DeBorst, contributed a chapter called “Parenting for Justice: How Can Parents Instill the Value of Justice in Their Children?� and I 
found it quite inspiring. By watching justice-focused documentaries, doing community projects together, cultivating a more simple lifestyle, eating dinner together and having substantial conversations, and displaying a poster of family hero Oscar Romero in the house, Ruth and her husband James provide a great, accessible example of what it looks like to seek social justice as a family.
Though I am not married and do not yet have kids, these considerations give me a compelling vision of what I would like my own home and family to be like someday. So much so that when I consider the sort of woman I’d like to marry, a commitment to social justice is without a doubt one of the most attractive qualities there is. You know, that other part of Proverbs 31.
So, I’ll conclude with this: while addressing broken family structures alone is not enough in terms of social justice, it’s definitely an essential building block, and I think the study does an excellent job of making that case.
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