July 13, 2024 will forever be remembered as the day there was an assassination attempt on former President and current Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump during his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
The news was heard around the world. The video of a triumphant, bloodied Trump with a fist in the air, yelling “Fight, fight, fight” made its way to all social media feeds, and to every news station, immediately.
I didn’t have much of a chance to look. I got an alert and some texts. But before I could open the “X” app, go online or respond to the incoming messages, my wife intercepted, saying, “Hey, let’s stay in the moment.” My stepdaughter agreed. After all, we’d spent hours in line at KettelHouse Amphitheater near Missoula, Montana, getting a prime spot by the barricade for Ziggy Marley. We hadn’t seen him since September of 2016, his message of peace, love and unity feeling just as critical then.
On July 13, Ziggy’s mission was clear before he set foot on stage. Following a feel-good, funky set by Lettuce, the voice of John F Kennedy, whose presidency – and life – was cut short by a bullet to the head on Nov. 22, 1963, came through the speakers. It was his famous American University commencement address, in which he says, “let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
This oration was followed by Charlie Chaplin’s final speech in The Great Dictator: “We all want to help one another, human beings are like that. We want to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery. We don’t want to hate and despise one another…The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men’s souls, has barricaded the world with hate…Our knowledge has made us cynical: Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much, and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities life will be violent, and all will be lost.”
Each speech received a loud applause. Martin Luther King, Jr. came next, another great man whose life was lost to gun violence. And then Ziggy’s father, Bob, himself a survivor of an assassination attempt, spoke through the speakers, immediately drowned out by screams. Then Ziggy came out and started singing “Be Free,” with a third verse more prescient than ever: “The government’s got too much control. Now is there some place that we can roll? The politics of fear and oppression is everywhere now. The law is closing in, just take what you can bring.”
Ziggy and his band elevated us from beginning to end, encouraging us to sing along to songs we all knew by heart, songs like “Is This Love?” where he had us singing the chorus, and as we yelled “Is this love, is this love, is this love that I’m feeling?” Ziggy responded back with a defiant “yes,” his smile beaming. The woman next to me was so elated I could see tears swelling up in her eyes. My wife and stepdaughter were also entranced, and at peace, sanctified in the spirit of jubilation.
Another highlight was singing along to “One Love,” which is also the name of the Bob Marley biopic that came out earlier this year starring Kingsley Ben-Adir, a movie that emphasized the power and richness of music, and its power to unite a nation. In 1978, during the One Love Peace Concert in Jamaica, Ziggy’s father invited Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and Jamaica Labour Party Leader Edward Seaga onstage. He held their hands together in the spirit of unity and peace, a moment unfathomable in today’s America.
“One Love” – both the film and the song – serve as reminders that we can’t give up on the dream of harmony, and we can’t stew on the ugliness that surrounds us. Hate begets hate. Violence begets violence. What occurred on July 13 in Pennsylvania is horrifying, albeit not entirely surprising. Oddly, when it comes to assassinations, it’s more often those preaching non-violence, those who are stewards for change (such as Kennedy and King) who are slain. In this case, we are seeing hateful words come back around to spew hateful actions, just as we did on Jan. 6, 2021, and in October of 2022 when Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul was bludgeoned by a hammer at his own home, the perpetrator looking to kidnap the former Speaker of the House.
As many processed this egregious moment in American history, as conspiracy theories trickled in, we stayed with Ziggy, his songs serving as offerings. He sang of revolution, leading us in his father’s anthem “Get Up, Stand Up,” and mashing it with “War,” a song derived from a 1963 speech by Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie I: Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war, me say war.” The concert was like a service, each song an extension of a sermon, each one encouraging us to seek salvation, delivering us from the darkness.
But now here we are, living in a toxic shift, one that has carried on through the pandemic. Political division is crippling us, trickling down from the national level and infiltrating community organizations that used to work together, regardless of party affiliation. We see this happening with school boards, local government and we see it destroying families.
Instead of trying to heal, we dehumanize the other side. Instead of empathizing with the other side, we argue, insistent on proving that we are right.
Seeing Ziggy on the evening of Trump’s assassination attempt exacerbated the stark contrast between the rhetoric of love and the rhetoric of disdain and contempt. And it’s obvious. Following the events of July 13, both parties have called for cooling these cries of hatred and disdain, however, it doesn’t appear we’re sticking with it.
But perhaps Charlie Chaplin is right. Perhaps “we don’t want to hate and despise one another.” If that’s the case, how do we get this message across? How can we change the apocalyptic rhetoric that is turning us into enemies. Abraham Lincoln, whose life was lost to gun violence during the most vitriolic time in our nation’s history, said, “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be by the better angels of our nature.” We seem to be getting further away from this message with each election year.
We are heeding different calls and have different leaders to follow. We subscribe to different news silos. We are isolated, choosing the comfort of our interests on our smart phones rather than start a conversation and meet someone new while in public. We need truth, but when truth cannot be agreed upon we are trapped in a vicious cycle, one where there is no agreement, and no leader we all can rally behind. Could that even happen again?
On July 13, in Missoula, it did. We got behind Ziggy, who encouraged us to seek our own path to redemption. He closed with “Personal Revolution,” singing “I don’t like the hypocrisy. Is this democracy? There is no voice for me in your philosophy. Tainted theology. Oh can you save me (who can save me) Who can save me? Revolution.”
What that means differs from person to person, but it starts individually. It starts locally – and it rises. It starts by changing the narrative, by changing the dialogue, just as Ziggy suggests in “World Revolution:”
“Dem talking ’bout world war, we’re talking ’bout world revolution. Dem talking ’bout dropping bombs, we’re talking ’bout a peaceful solution. Dem talking ’bout their old ways, we’re talking ’bout a new generation. Dem talking ’bout world war, we’re talking ’bout world revolution.”
As the show came to a close, I thought again of what my wife said, of her encouragement to stay in the moment, to stay connected to what Ziggy offers. How about we take it one step further? Let’s try to stay in harmony. We can do this each day not by reacting, but by responding, by choosing love. That’s what the 4,000 of us at KettelHouse did as we “stood in the circle of peace,” dancing and celebrating oneness with Ziggy in the Big Sky Country, where he and his band filled us with positive vibrations. This moment can be recaptured. It can be a mantra. Each day is a new day, and we can’t give into cynicism. We can’t be defeated. As Ziggy’s father said, “let’s get together and feel alright.”
charliebigsky.com 
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