History does not repeat, but it often rhymes.

55 years before 2020, the United States was in the throes of the Civil Rights movement, having just passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 55 years before that, the US was just starting to give women the right to vote as the first suffrage parade took the streets of New York City in 1910 and the city of Philadelphia conducted a general strike.

In similar iterations of this cycle, we find some of the first anti-slavery and proslavery violence took place as a part of the Bleeding Kansas riots, the hanging of Gabriel Prosser for plotting a slave revolt in Richmond, Virginia, and the first seeds of what would become the American Revolution being sown by the Knowles Riot in 1747.

Do I need to go on? The cycles in America move slowly but inevitably, like massive gears.

The augurs of American Spring have broken the earth again, and we follow their rotation to complete the long, long revolution which has been happening since before this government was founded on the unceded land of native peoples and then built with the blood of a kidnapped people. We are at the beginning of the slow turning of one of these cycles, and if we are lucky, can seize on its revolution to bring about one of our own.

I think about these cycles fairly often. The small ones--like birth and death, childhood and old age, the meeting and parting of people--and the large ones--war, famine, oppression and rebellion--are cosmically indistinguishable yet so very different in feeling from our small perspective.

Some of these cycles bring me joy. The children coming to us and getting older, the people coming together and leaving like a massive tide in both physical and political space. Such-like things I love. Some of these cycles bring me sadness, or anger. My maternal grandfather being thrown to the wolves on the beaches of Normandy, the nature of the state to kill its most fervent critics to maintain its lily-white dominance. The most essential of these cycles has been continually denied every time it has come up in its rotation by all nations--the right to breathe freely in one's innocence. This is the one I most hope to see complete its revolution.

Musically, this small thesis-statement is indebted to Shabaka Hutchings and Philip Glass, amongst everyone else I have ever heard and listened to. Spiritually, this is a diary of my time participating in the struggle in Chicago in whatever limited way I can. Perhaps this is the contribution of a single pen-stroke in the poetry of history, or at least in our record of the memory of it.

Rest in peace to George Floyd, a fellow musician.

--MDR