Playing for Change

Every now and then you come across something that just feels really good, and the video on this page is one of them.  Take a look at it and I dare you not to come away just a bit happier.

It was done for a documentary called "Playiing For Change: Peace Through Music".  Now I don't know how, or if any of these videos do any lasting good, but at the minimum, it's a break from the daily newspaper headlines, forever reminding us how stupid we all are.

If I take the high road, and think that they do help, I have noticed that more and more of these efforts are global, and just maybe we're entering a time when we can be just a tad bit more tolerant and understanding of other cultures.

Slumdog Millionaire, Kiva, Palestinian and Jewish college student's LendforPease, are all small cultural indications that we  might be in another Copernican time.  The Astronomer Copernicus, as you might remember, was one of the first to suggest that the earth wasn't at the center of the universe... an idea that got you in a whole lot of trouble if you said out loud -a fact that Galileo discovered some 50 years after Copernicus, when the Church 'commanded and enjoined' him from saying any so heretical. 

They so wanted the earth to be the one and only celestial body picked by God, and no way he could have picked it and not made it the center of everything.

Well, most humans now admit that the universe doesn't center on earth, but most humans still have trouble admitting that their own faith, culture or race isn't the 'chosen' one.  It's going to be truely fun to watch how, when the inevitable happens and intelligent life is discovered elsewhere in the galaxy, various religions accomadate that into their theologies - Actually I suspect we will figure out a way to rationalize still be the chosen species...

In the meantime, I'll accept the slightly schmaltzy tenor of videos like 'Playing For Change' and hope that it's just the beginning.