By Amanda Painter
A few days ago Redemption Song by Bob Marley came on the radio and I found myself almost in tears. I’ve always loved the song, but recent urges toward certain personal evolutions were resonating with the line, “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our minds.” It was a timely reminder that whatever help I may get from astrology or friends and lovers, ultimately I’m the one who has to do the work. Having help just… helps. Sometimes a lot.
The experience got lost in the shuffle of the weekend until just yesterday. I was listening to Democracy Now! on the radio as Amy Goodman interviewed Sean Penn in Haiti (he has been managing a tent camp of 55,000 there for five or six months) and during the break, they played a few seconds of a Haitian artist named BelO covering the song. I found myself noticing the wider implications of the song in this context: it has been six months since that huge earthquake devastated this island nation born of the slave trade; a nation enslaved to poverty and now physical destruction as well.
I listened to Sean Penn compare an American’s frustration with the slowness of an energy-saving light bulb with a Haitian’s joy at simply having electric light, as well as the strength that has necessarily come from their having had to make do with so very little for so very long. Yes, there are many forms of mental slavery. For many of us it’s easy to forget just how much we really are capable of in the midst of comfort.
True, most of us do not have a Hollywood star’s bank account and connections at our disposal to co-found our own non-profit organization so effectively. But we here reading on the internet do have the power to reach out, share news, remind our friends that everything is not “back to normal” in Haiti, and that the aim needs to be for “better than normal” given what normal was before the earthquake.
I think this snippet from the rush transcript gives some sense of where to aim: