Like you no doubt I have friends who send me videos, photographs and articles. I tend to ignore most of the videos because I come from the look and read generation and prefer to read the transcript in a couple of minutes rather than watch a video for much longer.

But now and again I receive a video with a recommendation from someone who knows my preference for words over pictures, and then I look at it.

One recently came to me about a gifted woman artist named Kaziah who has given herself the task of painting portraits of soldiers killed in American political adventures abroad for the sake of the grieving families.

She is interviewed and voice overed by someone who not unexpectedly tries to turn her into a heroine for foregoing the thousands of dollars she could have made from her other paintings instead of spending the time and trouble she takes in painting the family portraits for free. She treats that bullshit with the contempt it deserved. Here, I hope is the URL.

http://www.militarytimes.com/hancock

Coincidentally…and many of you know what I think about things that people call coincidence…coincidentally I was next day sent a video by a musician who certainly knows where I stand on the matter of words and pictures. It was of a woman singer.

The singer is pointing out that you must do what you can with what you’ve got and you must use what you’ve got. She does it excellently well. Here again, I hope is the URL…if that is the correct alphabet soup.

http://www.ted.com/talks/eddi_reader_sings_about_what_you_ve_got.html

Years ago after the Sarajevo mess, which no doubt 90% of the population has forgotten about, I wrote an article for another musician about doing what you can do in a situation where nothing rational seemed to be available. Since it is totally cogent to the videos I received I repost it in case my URL’s didn’t work. Some human stories are NEVER out of date. I wrote this one in November 2006 as some of you will pick up from the comments.

Now Black Friday is over. Millions of lemmings have camped out in the cold and had their fist fights over deliberately contrived shortages of things they didn’t really want until there was a shortage of them. The stress of the coming Christmas and the insatiable, expensive wants of TV saturated children are impinging on single parents who haven’t had a raise for five years.

Hundreds of innocent civilians are being killed monthly in Iraq. Our armed forces are stuck in an impossible situation produced by the lies of a sociopathic, power-crazy administration, without regard for humanity. Our previously honored country is now despised all over the world as a gross bully. What can one insignificant person do about this avalanche of miseries? This story may give you a personal clue to follow.

Not long since I was talking to a professional cello player who also seemed to be thwarted by adverse circumstances. The situation of apparent powerlessness in a society filled with huge groups, antagonistic to one another and apparently immune to any suggestions or arguments from individuals who are not millionaires is familiar to us all.

But when I mentioned the name Vedran, my friendly cellist immediately got the message, and brightened up perceptibly. "But not everybody knows about Vedran," said she, "Do a little piece about what he did." It seemed a good idea. Here it is, an inexpensive but unique gift to the right person.

Mahatma Gandhi was famous for his ability to perform simple actions that produced astonishing and unexpected results.

When he was working, without an army, friendly terrorists, or financial backing to free India from the Imperialist British rule he gave an eerily wise piece of advice to his followers. They were solution-oriented people who couldn’t see the big picture, and were perplexed as to how the simple things he was asking them to do would have any effect on the stranglehold that the British army and administration had on the Indian millions.

He said, “What you have to do may seem insignificant to you, but it is of vital importance that you do it.”

The point is that all you can do is what you can do—not what someone else can do. And Vedran Smailovic took that lesson to heart and made a difference in an impossible position.

You may have a dim memory of a fairly recent conflict in a war-shattered and hatred filled city called Sarajevo, that was the current bad news headlines not too long ago.

You may also remember the fuss made by the media when a mortar bomb hit a crowd of innocent people waiting outside a bakery for bread, while the current crop of fanatics were killing each other and anyone else in their vicinity.

Twenty-two people were killed in the incident. Vedran Smailovic decided to inject his energy, will, intention and courage into the atmosphere of hatred, distrust and fear. He was a cellist who played in the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra. What he could do was play the cello very well. So instead of joining one side or the other, and continuing the endless cycle of violence and retaliation, he did something that would have won enormous approval from Mahatma Gandhi. He did what he could.

He took a fire-damaged chair, and sat outside the wrecked bakery and played his cello. He did it properly. Dressed in the formal evening dress of a professional orchestral musician he sat there every day for twenty two days, in full view of snipers and the trigger happy, and played Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor.

The piece of music was symbolic in itself. It was made up of fragments that survived the WWII Allied fire bombing of the refugee filled city of Dresden, which killed about 100,000 people in one night raid on a city without any military targets, just to impress the advancing Soviet army. The music itself was a symbol of beauty arising from the ashes of an act of blatant destruction.

Like Gandhi’s march to the sea, where he led a huge crowd to the sea and had them eat salt, thus scoffing at the new tax on salt produced by the British, this was an apparently absurd and irrelevant thing to do in the middle of a war zone.

But it was an infinitely civilized gesture of faith in the power of significant beauty to replace meaningless horror. Before the twenty-two days were over, other civilized people had been inspired and were playing beside him.

And in other dangerous intersections in the city other musicians did the same thing, deliberately injecting beauty into chaos, at considerable risk to themselves.
Eventually the fighting stopped but Vedran’s gesture lived on. All factions involved, Croats, Serbs, Muslims and Christians, know about it and honor him. Flowers are regularly placed where he played, as if on a shrine.

And even in the Big-Mac, big bank balance world over here, where music and art are the first things to go in our business dominated education system, his gesture resonated.

The New York Times magazine had an article about him in 1992 that was read by another cellist in Seattle, Washington. Beliz Brother organized twenty-two cellists to play for twenty-two days in twenty-two public places in Seattle.

On the last day they all got together and played outside a store front window display of burned bread pans, twenty-two loaves, and twenty-two roses.

This story filtered into the news networks all over the world and in this way Vedran came to see that his gesture had borne fruit world-wide. The gesture continues.

In the days of my youth, when Gandhi was gently, but irresistibly applying his moral judo to the British Raj in India, there were three faces that could be recognized anywhere in the world. They were the faces of Gandhi, Einstein and Mickey Mouse.

The two humans were unique in the way they had stood alone, and risked telling their truth to the world. The world they left behind was irrevocably altered because they did that, without benefit of PR men or armies, and the world eventually had to listen to their messages.

They both said true things that made no sense whatever to the then current public consensus. But now their inspired vision is the basis of some of that consensus.

Vedran is an example of someone who followed Gandhi’s advice, and did what he could do without investing in the consequences. He applied that advice to what on the face of it was a totally intractable situation. He did what he could do. So can you. What is it I wonder?