It was Jackson Browne that made me invade that nuclear test site, sir…

Grate­ful Child is a self-described elder­ly hip­py liv­ing in Con­necti­cut who pings all of us at Green­peace with love every now and again. He sends encour­ag­ing mes­sages when we save whales. He made up mugs and mouse­mats for the web team to say thanks for the web site. He chats with our sup­port­er ser­vices folks about this and that. He makes trib­ute web­sites to our ships crew.

A while back, he sent me links to a cou­ple Jack­son Browne videos. Out of the blue. And some­how he plucked the string of some Jun­gian syn­chronic­i­ty wave or some­thing, and watch­ing them made me reflect on exact­ly how much Jack­son had to do with me get­ting on a path that led to Green­peace.

Are we sit­ting com­fort­ably? Then let’s begin.

In 1972 I was 14 years old. Nixon was in the White­house. I had no pol­i­tics, no idea where my life was going to go, no formed opin­ions about much of any­thing. But I had this lit­tle tran­sis­tor radio (SOLID STATE!) and I’d obses­sive­ly scan the AM air­waves at night for sig­nals from far off places like Chicago and Detroit so I could lis­ten to scratchy sta­t­ic-filled songs which would fade in and out on ionos­pher­ic waves. My musi­cal expo­sure up to then had been pret­ty lim­it­ed to the few items my par­ents had on 33rpm albums: Herb Alpert and the Tia­jua­na Brass, the Ray Con­niff Singers, Glenn Camp­bell.

And one night I heard “Rock me on the Water.” For what­ev­er rea­son, I want­ed to know who wrote that song. OK, may­be that gospel anthemic qual­i­ty spoke to an alter­na­tive catholocism or some­thing in me. Indeed, the only stand I’d ever tak­en was about this time, when I told my father I felt like a hyp­ocrite going to church and I didn’t want to go any­more. He told me I was too young to know what a hypor­crite was, and I was going to church. Then sud­den­ly the whole fam­i­ly stopped going to church. Hmmm…

“Oh peo­ple, look around you. The signs are every­where.
You’ve left it to some­one oth­er than you,
to be the one to care.”

Now what the heck made me think “Here was a teacher. Here was wis­dom?” I haven’t a clue. But here was some­body with some­thing to say that made you pause in your gum chew­ing. And when I sub­se­quent­ly heard “Doc­tor my Eyes” and “For a Dancer” I was com­plete­ly pulled in.

Through­out high­school and Uni­ver­si­ty I col­lect­ed Jackson’s lyrics and songs and scru­ti­nized them. I dug the poet­ry. I didn’t get the pol­i­tics. I could relate to “Before the Del­uge” at a kind of sci-fi lev­el — it was enter­tain­ing fic­tion, noth­ing more. As late as my soph­more year at George­town, when a lit­er­a­ture pro­fes­sor had me read­ing George Luck­as, I still didn’t get, real­ly, what pol­i­tics had to do with lit­er­a­ture or any­thing out­side the elec­toral process.

But I knew I didn’t like some­thing there at the school that spawned Joe McCarthy and where Hen­ry Kis­sen­ger lat­er became a pro­fes­sor. I didn’t fit with the eco­nom­ics of the place. I didn’t fit with what I expe­ri­enced as the rote learn­ing, no-think­ing meth­ods in the School of For­eign Ser­vice (I was unlucky — there were excel­lent, thought-pro­vok­ing pro­fes­sors there, but I large­ly missed them). I wasn’t a yup­py and I couldn’t play with yup­pies. I fell in with a crowd of repro­bate musi­cian non­con­formist poets. And one day one of them said we should head down to this thing, some con­cert on the mall where Jack­son Browne and a bunch of oth­er cool cats were going to be. It was for some cause, and it was called “No Nukes.”

Well, I sud­den­ly found my con­text. I lis­tened to what I was hear­ing there, I felt the uni­ty, I felt the buzz of the pow­er of num­bers. And what had been a white noise of news about the dan­gers of nuclear pow­er and Three Mile Island and the Dia­blo Canyon reac­tor all sud­den­ly came into focus as some­thing I ought to care about — and sud­den­ly did care about. Lau­rie Ander­son would impress me years lat­er by describ­ing artists as the radar of soci­ety: they ampli­fy the­se weak sig­nals that are com­ing in and make them vis­i­ble, audi­ble, get them talked about.

All the pol­i­tics in those songs sud­den­ly fell into place. It was pol­i­tics, sure, but it was bound up in poet­ry, in the tra­di­tion of the Roman­tics or Emer­son and Thore­au — it was all about a small group of peo­ple who shared a com­mon light try­ing to make that light shine brighter, to share it, to fire the imag­i­na­tions of oth­ers with it. It was about mak­ing the world more like a place we’d feel at home in. It was about respect­ing the pow­er of nature and favor­ing that over the pur­suit of mon­ey. And all of the sud­den I realised that what I’d thought of as “pol­i­tics” was a pret­ty thin slice of the spec­trum. I start­ed read­ing Wen­dell Berry, Saul Alin­sky, Edward Abby. I began to see how deeply pol­i­tics is ingrained with every choice we make every day — how every time we buy some­thing we vote for a cer­tain vision of what the world should be, how every time we agree or dis­agree with some­one we’re say­ing some­thing about our idea of what’s right and what’s wrong.

Before I knew it, I was camped out at ground zero at the Nevada Test site, try­ing to stop a nuclear weapons det­o­na­tion. I was in jail in Boston for protest­ing the seal hunt. I was get­ting chased down a dri­ve­way by an NRA mem­ber with a shot­gun. I was sail­ing on the Rain­bow War­rior. I was on a path.

Thanks, Jack­son. The wind be with you now.