(cue theme music)
Voice of Announcer: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen; I am K. Maurice Bookerman, CEO of the Emergency Hoodoo Broadcasting Corporation and this is a special live broadcast from the Stanknasity Leadership Conference, where the Honorable Reverend Dr. Boogaloo is preaching!
Let's listen in as he continues to bring us the Funky Word!"
Rev. Boogaloo: "They say that social capital begins at home and spreads abroad. Aman and Aman-ed!
Since this might be my last time to spread something on you, I ask you: when was the last time you went to a music recital just to encourage-by-your-presence a young boy or young girl who is beginning to play piano, or trumpet or cello? They didn’t have to be your child by the way...they could have been your neighbor’s child...
Or when was the last time you went out of your way to volunteer at a summer camp to help some young kid stay out of trouble?
Or when was the last time you simply stopped in to say hi and well done to a group of young people putting together a community theatre project in your neighborhood?
You say those kinds of things don’t happen where you live? Oh Really now? How can that be? Because if you’re able to understand what I’m saying right now, that means somebody helped you to learn english somewhere.
Had it not been for somebody who provided you with a book or subtitles on a movie screen - the information to understand english - you would not have been able to understand my last sentence.
Had somebody not taken the time to teach you how to read, count for yourself and tie your shoes, you would be stumbling around today, lost, broke and trippin’ over your own two feet! Say Aman somebody!
Everything we know we start learning from the time we are born.
From birth until around the age of 12, we gather information quickly and unconsciously, absorbing information from our social group environment. We learn to give meaning to the information we take in through symbols (such as language), our heroes & sheroes (such as our parents), and rituals (such as toilet training). This learning we do is largely unconscious or unreflected. Also, we learn to tell the difference between evil & good, dirty & clean, forbidden & permitted, ugly vs beautiful, normal & abnormal. We call this information cultural values and it is our first level of mental programming.
But from our teens on, we begin to switch from unconscious to conscious learning based on new patterns of thinking, feeling and acting: at school and at work we learn about gender, ethnicity, social class, generational difference, regional difference and national difference. This is our second level of mental programming. Because we carry these mental programs - a set of common cultural values - with us, most of us belong to a number of different groups at the same time.
And wouldn’t you know it, the mental programs from these various values sometimes conflict: religious values vs generational values or gender values vs organizational values, zum beispiel. These conflicting mental programs/cultural values challenge us to anticipate or understand our behavior and the behavior of others in each new situation.
Trying to make some sense of these conflicting cultural values is what is known as understanding cultural difference.
I can see you scratching your head now trying to figure out what the hell I’m talking about.
Well, this is a micro-mini version of a long explanation why investing in people not only makes sense, but creates social capital...and no, I’m not talking about Chocolate City, I’m talking about the human resources that reside in social networks.
If you think about the value of what you know - your knowledge, skills and experience - then access to social capital depends on who you are connected to: who you know. In other words, the bigger and more diverse your social and work networks are, the more resources - knowledge, skills and experiences - you can have access to. These resources include all the information, new ideas, opportunities, influence and emotional support that you don’t have by yourself. And of course it stands to reason that understanding cultural differences goes a long way to ensure anyone’s expansion of social capital anywhere in the world.
This is why I’m so glad I don’t know everything. Happy-loo-yah to the Stank! And I’m even happier that there are people I know who know things that I don’t have a clue about. Aman-ed! For verily, verily, this is why we know the funk as a collaborative process: it capitalizes on the things we don’t know while at the same time creating something new from the things that someone else we’re connected to knows everything about! Good-googly-woogly! I’m on fire today...
I know for sure that some of the best mental programming anybody can get is learning to play music with other people at a young age, because learning to play an actual musical instrument (nothin’ wrong with two turntables and a microphone but...) requires the mind and body to do particular things. If you learn to play the drums, or a guitar, or a clarinet, or a trombone, or a bassoon, or an oboe, or a saxophone, or a flute, or an upright bass, you learn a skill I like to call developing musical imagery - the ability to imagine sound without a direct sound source.
And if you do this with other people, say in a band or group or orchestra, you get to learn other things like concentration, coordination, patience, communication, cooperation, teamwork, self-expression, conquering fear, solving problems and taking risks.
WOOOOOO!! Look at whoever is sitting with you right now and say to them “TAKE A RISK!”
One of the best examples of how this works I saw awhile back...a friend of mine had some tickets to a concert and they couldn’t go, and so they called me and Mrs. Boogaloo and invited us to use their tickets...
As it so happened, it was a concert by a group of singers from Venezuela...what they call a Chamber Chorus.
Now I’m ignorant about Spanish, and I never had the chance to go to Venezuela, but the tickets were free and we had time, so we decided to go...and GOOD-GAWD-IN-PEAS, them folk SANG! I mean they really sang their hind-parts off! In fact, after the concert, I got to talk to some of them (through a translator) and they began to tell me about the music education schools in their country. This is how I found out about El Sistema.
See, for you to understand El Sistema, you gotta understand that they started this music education program for young people more that 35 years ago in one of the roughest, toughest places on earth. In fact today, they say that Caracas is one of the most dangerous cities on the planet: grinding poverty, hyper-violent gang murders, drugs, name it...Caracas today makes Detroit, New Orleans or Miami-Dade look like Disneyworld.
But yet, in spite of their hardship, the people of Caracas have provided a model of success that other people all over the world - including North Americans - are using to help themselves. In fact, the El Sistema model for community participation in the arts is also a model for participative democracy.
How did they do that there Rev. Boogaloo, I hear you ask?
By putting skin in the game: building a community based music education network.
I’m not gonna get into all the facts: how most of the families live on less than 100 dollars a month, how the kids learn to play violins on paper mache instruments for the first couple of years, learning ear training first by singing the notes - while learning finger positions and bowing - BEFORE they get a real instrument, how students learn 6 days a week 4 hours a day in 130 music centers (Núcleos) around the country, how musical perfection is not the goal but changing community life by changing the lives of families is, or how Venezuela is now producing some of the best symphonies in the world at the moment.
What I will titillate you with is this: governments will fail you.
It doesn’t matter who’s in office; administrations come and go.
Without building a community, you wont be able to sustain anything worthwhile.
How can I say this? Look at the El Sistema model: for 39 years, this program has been sustained by people power...volunteers...ordinary people not born with silver spoons in their mouths, working, sacrificing and giving past the pain, indignity, frustration, fear and anxiety of living in poverty to ensure this program’s survival, to secure their own humanity.
I wonder how much skin you are gonna put in the game today, in spite of whatever challenge you are currently up against.
Let me help you: whenever I need to do something that I don't particularly feel like doing, I start singing an old negroid spiritual and it picks me up right away! Why don't you try it??
Oh the world is funny,
have you never heard,
I have seen 'bout ev'rything to see...
But if I, if I could lift you up above the earth,
I could see your drawers over me!
Lift it up, Lift it up
Yes it seeps through eternity;
And if I, if I could lift it up, above the earth,
I could see your drawers over me!!!!"
more on the web
Comments