This should be a holiday, an international holiday to celebrate the Dream of Peace on Earth. This day should be celebrated with music and positive messages, it should be honored by dignitaries and everyone should get this day off…with pay…so that instead of working for the Almighty Dollar, we have a day to work on nothing but World Peace. This day, a holiday around the globe, is not a religious holiday, it is not a national holiday nor a “Hallmark” holiday…it is a day to simply do something positive for peace…for World Peace, for Local Peace, for Peace of Mind, for Peace of Heart…this holiday is more significant that Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter or other Christian holidays…they are, after all, of very questionable origins and most likely based on fabrication, myth and 1% truth…This day, 09 October, is about something real, somebody who really did walk the Earth, spread a message of Peace & Love and has done more to bridge the gap between all people in less than 20 years than Christians have done in over 2,000 years. It’s more relevant than other religious holidays too, Chanukah or Passover or Yom Kippur…a more peaceful holiday than Ramadan, more inclusive than Kwanza…Today, which is the day John Winston Ono Lennon was born in 1940, the 9th of October, is World Peace Day. Yeah, I know, you may say that I’m a dreamer…but I’m not the only one!
I’ve told the tale before, perhaps even in this blog but my first notion, the first inkling I ever had about The Beatles was around 1965-66, I was a child who loved the music cartoons of these funny talking characters called The Beatles. I thought they were, like all the cartoons I watched, simply make-believe, they were animated imaginations that told little stories…except this one had songs in it, The Beatles cartoons were simply just that to me…a simple, meaningless cartoon. The summer of 1966, while my parents were setting up our new life in California, my brother and I were staying at my mother’s family place in Chicago. I had been dragged to an old Catholic Church in Logan Square with my Boosha (maternal grandma) so she could pray, she made me sit in the back of the church and I looked at the big, wood carved cross with a bloody, painful looking Jesus nailed to it…there was blood dripping from his hands and feet, his eyes were half rolled into his head in agony and it scared the fuck out of the 6 year old me! Boosha would talk about how important Jesus Christ was, how he was going to save us and all but I didn’t really understand, I just listened. One day, the week before my mother would come get us and take us to San Francisco, the afternoon cartoon program on WGN Channel 9 was interrupted with a special news report, live from O’Hare Airport (Chicago’s airport) and it was The Beatles! Except, it wasn’t those four goofy looking cartoon characters, it was four real guys with long hair sitting behind a mound of microphones and one of them was talking about how “I didn’t mean The Beatles were better Than Christ or anything…” and that stopped my heart! They were not cartoons, they were really real and they were compared to Jesus Christ too? When my cool Uncle Bob got home that evening, I asked him about The Beatles and he played “Rubber Soul” for me…I was hooked, that was it, I was a fan.
Over the years, after The Beatles broke up, while John Lennon was still active on the scene, I always bought his music first (then George’s) because I identified most with him…Please don’t misunderstand me, I dearly Love ALL FOUR BEATLES and do not hold any one of them as being better or above the others…the truth is, NON of them would be anything if not for each other…even Ringo, nothing happened for The Beatles until Ringo joined the band; but John expressed his emotions in a raw way, his songs matched my own feelings…the darkness, sadness and pain…the sarcastic, intellectual and playful…John (and George) always seemed to me to be a bit more honest and genuine about themselves…Ringo played a clown, Paul is a master showman, but John was more like a real guy…he showed his warts and all, he made no qualms about being an asshole, a prick, a bad father, poor lover…he owned his shit as much as he owned his glories…that is attractive to me. When, in 1975 John announced he was “retiring” from the music business…and then co-wrote “Fame” with David Bowie (and Carlos Alomar)…even that was a real truth. Lennon lived up to it too, from 1975 until late in the summer of 1980, John stayed out of the limelight and simply enjoyed his life, made himself a better man, a better father, a better person and didn’t give a shit about the music business, the top of the pops or even all the political hogwash…he set an example for me doing that too.
I sincerely wished he stayed retired, he’d be alive today if he did…but that wasn’t Lennon’s destiny and even he knew that (“The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me”)! John Lennon was murdered the day after my 19th birthday, like everything else that man did during my life, his death was also a huge influence on me, on who I chose to become during my lifetime. The tragic circumstances were far more terrible for John’s family, his friends and people who actually knew him…and it was shock wave around the world which still reverberates today, 36 years after his assassination. But one the saddest things, to me, is the way John Lennon has become canonized for this, he’s a fucking rock and roll saint or something and there are statues, memorials and such erected in his memory. I bet if John saw them he’d piss on them! The notion that John Lennon is any kind of saint or savior is ridiculous and it’s so very much NOT what John Lennon was about…he said it himself, “We ALL Shine On…Like Moon and Stars and The Sun…We All Shine On!” or “A Million heads are better than one, so come on!” or even his most iconic song, “Imagine”…John Lennon leaves the work of imagination to you and me, he’s right too, he may be a dreamer, but he’s not the only one…
So, although I’ve been celebrating the life of John Lennon every 9th of October since I can remember (I also celebrate other important artists/people too), I think Lennon’s birthday should be adopted as a World Holiday for Peace. We don’t need to leave it up to our “leaders”, we don’t need permission from our “employers”, all we have to do is Imagine it and it will indeed come to pass…because like John Lennon said, “The dream you dream alone is but a dream; the dream we dream together is reality.”
Then again, he also said “Reality leaves a lot to the Imagination…”
Happy Birthday John…Thank You for The Music.
