Perspectives: Sam’s Perspective – Together

Hello, I’m Sam Jones.

We are headed into the Holidays, a time of colorful lights and family. It’s also a time when we normally put aside our differences and come together in observance and celebration. But this year, I find myself wondering if we’ll be able to do that. I’ll admit I’ve grown a little long in the tooth and I’ve been blessed with a great many Holiday periods. Some were strained…the Vietnam period, the Nixon Presidency and the like, but I’ve never lived through a time when the country was so sharply divided, and that’s saying a lot. We are so divided that some are now saying the very foundation of our form of government is threatened.

Additionally this division is almost smothering us all, preventing us from seeing that there are better days to come and that the common good will prevail. A few days ago, I experienced something that reminded me of the importance of understanding, resolve and basic human decency.

I sat in a large, darkened room and along with several hundred other souls in need of cleansing and replenishment, as we allowed the sounds of Vivaldi and Rossini and Strauss and others, to pour over us like magic waters washing away, for a while anyway, the blanket of angry division. We were there to hear the Vienna Boys’ Choir. Based in Vienna, Austria, the choir is made up of approximately 100 youngsters between the ages of ten and fourteen from countries around the world. They are divided into four touring choirs, each highly trained. Between the four groups they will perform about 300 concerts each year before hundreds of thousands of people. Each group, tours for about nine to eleven weeks. The Vienna Boys’ Choir dates back to the late Middle Ages, around 1498 and carries a great deal of important musical history and development. The end result is, each touring group is of such strong caliber that it brings with it, what I referred to earlier as magic waters. During the Tulsa concert, I looked around the room. Just about all races were represented and all economic levels. It was a diverse audience listening to a diverse choir singing diverse music. Music brought them all together and diversity held them in place and the magic waters cleansed their souls.

I can’t tell you exactly what happened in that room but I can tell you, that when the music ended and the audience was leaving every man, woman and child had undergone a transformation. Complete strangers talking, smiling looking to the future and feeling that maybe, just maybe things are going to work out after all. Somehow the performance they’d just experienced together had given them all hope for a better tomorrow. And hope is something we can all use right now.

And that’s my Perspective.