Viral Spring #20: Bound for Glory

Woody Guthrie 

                           your old men shall dream dreams,
                       and your young men shall see visions.  
                                      Joel 2:28

In this apocalyptic time, as America is revealed in all her shame and beauty, an old man dreamed a dream: 

I was walking the wrong way on Grand Central Parkway --- a road without a sidewalk -- making my way against a tide of traffic speeding into New York.  My clothes were filthy, my shoes battered.  

A voice said stop, wake up, before you get hit by a car and killed.  But another voice No, keep going, walk the walk.  I kept going.   

The first voice said watch out, here comes a truck.  I walked through the truck and it vanished. Then I knew the dreamer was not a bum going the wrong way, but a spirit bound for glory.   

Suddenly I was behind the wheel of a powerful car, and the road was clear, leading up into mountains covered in green forest. The road followed a cliffside, the mountain soared beyond my vision, beyond human scale.  And in those mountains, a voice came sounding: 

                This land was made for you and me.   

The road peaked and led down into a valley, through towns and cities.... and there I left it, got out of the car, and it vanished.  Then the whole song came back to me -- including the last three verses, which hardly anyone knows today. 

                   In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people, 
                   By the relief office I seen my people; 
                   As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking 
                   Is this land made for you and me?  

Woody Guthrie wrote "This Land is Your Land" in the depths of the Great Depression --  a time echoed in America's crisis today.  He was walking across a country in economic ruins -- millions unemployed, lining up for soup in church basements, their next paycheck a government handout.  

                      As I went walking I saw a sign there 
                     And on the sign it said "No Trespassing" 
                     But on the other side it didn't say nothing. 
                      that side was made for you and me.  
                
The song was -- and is -- a protest against economic ruin brought on by economic excess, against those who would exploit the land and destroy the land for personal gain, who would claim the land as theirs and not the people's.  It's a protest against those who would set Americans against each other -- by race or religion, class, wealth, or political party.  This land was made for you AND me. 

                       Nobody living can ever stop me  
                       As I go walking that freedom highway
                       Nobody living can make me turn back
                       This land was made for you and me.

One thing the present crisis has done is to revive the battered idea of America, and, yes, its exceptionalism.  If we lose it, where do we look for a vision?  

If we save it, we have a new chance to fulfill its promise.  In Lincoln's words, which also now rise from the dead and make sense:  "One nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all (people) are created equal."  

                          From the redwood forest, to the gulfstream waters -- 

                                 This land was made for you and me.

 Words and music by Woody Guthrie
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips