TRANSCRIPT

I’m Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

I live in Music City, Nashville, USA. I thought the name Music City was a mere marketing ploy, but on my block, in each direction, also live songwriters, industry executives and studio professionals. When I arrived during the pandemic, I listened to bands practicing on a front yard, regaling the neighborhood with a free concert. My neighbor Mary texts me, “Major, what do you think of this lyric?” ‘I saw a midnight blue velvet tie-dye sky across your horizon line,’ she once sent me. Nashville lives up to its name. 

I am not a fan of cultural stereotypes. I often push back against regionalized portraits of people, but Nashville is also, if you haven’t heard, in the south — and as a visiting friend from Boston posted on social media, “Southern hospitality is alive and real down here.” 

Trust me, I know surface friendliness can be a veil for darker motives. But, since moving here, rude behavior is even more visible to me, here and elsewhere, because of the excessive climate of kindness.

The suited businessman who talks loudly in public spaces; the young woman rushing into buildings and lets doors shut on the elderly, the driver who crosses two lanes of traffic without turn signals, the art curator who looks about in search of more important people in the room, they all slightly chip away at our sense of decency. 

Rudeness erodes our collective good, undermines the possibility of a greater bonding between us and gently tears at the fabric of a civil society; there. I said it. 

Today’s poem encourages us to be aware of each other, to be more in awe of the miracle of now. With the presence of war on earth, I feel the beckoning call of this poem even more powerfully. Let kindness reign everywhere.

If
by Imtiaz Dharker

If we could pray. If 
we could say we have come here
together, to grow into a tree,
if we could see our blue hands
holding up the moon, and hear
how small the sound is
when it slips through 
our fingers into water,
when the meaning of words melts
away and sugarcane speaks
in fields more clearly
than our tongues,
when a child takes 
a stick as long as itself

and rolls a wheel
down a lane on wings of dust,
in control, would we 
think then that we should thank
someone? If we knew
we could turn, and turning
feel that things could be different.
But we are unused 
to gratitude, if we could lose 
our pride, bend down
look for peace on the iron
ground. If we could

kneel.

“If” by Imtiaz Dharker from THE TERRORIST AT MY TABLE © 2006 Imtiaz Dharker. Used by permission of Bloodaxe Books.