A few weeks ago our adopted hometown of Grand Forks, ND started to go through a trauma of sorts.

We moved to GF in 1990, figuring we’d try a few years there, then on to a new job. What we weren’t expecting was the soul of Grand Forks. This was a community filled with the Arts. Theatre, music, visual arts, writers, potters, and passionate artisans. A major university, and a large Air Force Base, will jumpstart things like that. 

We had young kids, and quickly learned that the community was a great place to raise them. Winters were tough, but the summers, oh the summers were long days, and comfortable temps. To this day I maintain that there is nothing like a North Dakota summer.

But the music, and the arts, that was where the magic lay. Instrumental and orchestral music began in the fourth grade. Each grade sang. Theatre was right there with their performing brethren, and visual arts were amped up by a program that brought artists into the elementary schools to work and play shoulder to shoulder. Finally, in our latter years of kids in school, came a children’s choir of a couple of hundred students, who all auditioned for a space in one of four choirs, with lots of singing and solidarity.

The trauma has come by way of a school board that has decided that it needs to create a cushion in the budget, by way of securing 15% of their budget as set aside money. That cushion will be made by cutting or reducing music programs, languages, and, of all things in a STEM focused society, computer science. I can’t say if the logic, despite its destructiveness, isn’t solid. I’ve been away from the day to day politics of the community for some time, and really can’t speak toward or against the plan. But I can say that, with everything going on in this world, to take school music programs, some of which are in the top tier nationwide, and tie the music teachers’ hands with reductions of class time and lessons- well, that seems senseless. But then, the art of cutting the arts in our schools is age-old.

So, this has been in the background of my mind for the past few weeks. At the front of my mind is the more immediate concern of the disharmony of adults who are fighting each other with the politics of our day. That politics is bearing itself with outright lies, and raw lust for power, that are at terrible levels that I don’t think we’ve ever seen in the political life of our nation.

Before I go on, I need to tell everyone that I love music. Give me a genre; rock, pop, folk, country (sorry, but not bro country), classical, even some rap. If it’s done well, I’ll listen to it. And I’ll sing to it. To share a confession with you, I like to sing. I really do. Whether I’m a good singer or not doesn’t matter, though I don’t think that I’m a good singer. That said, I will start singing along to a song at the drop of a beat.

My musical exposure started in my hometown Minnesota school, picking up the clarinet for band, joining the high school choir, and finding the joy of shared self-expression, as well as the bane of not really investing myself in the world of practice (sorry music teachers).

Growing up, we had three TV stations available- one from Mankato, and two from Sioux Falls. PBS didn’t exist yet. Radio-wise, we had everything from rock and pop, country, polka (from KNUJ, “the polka station of the nation”), and everything radio from WCCO in Minneapolis, a clear channel station (meaning that, at night, it broadcast around the country), filled with a wide variety of music, and radio entertainment. We also had a fledgling Minnesota Public Radio, that in 1974 introduced me (and the state of Minnesota) to this little radio program that featured music, story, radio comedy, and a whole lot of quirk- ‘The Prairie Home Companion’. 

This is my musical pedigree- high school band and choir, radio, and television.

There is actually a common thread here, if one dares to tug at it a bit. These experiences, the music made, the TV watched, and the radio heard, weren’t just my experience; they were a common experience of many in Minnesota back in the day. Heck, variations of this experience could be found in towns and cities across the United States. We had common lineage from the entertainment of the day.

Which brings me back around to high school music programs in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

A couple of days ago, while pondering music and choir, and listening to the run-on nonsense spoken by one of the presidential candidates, it seemed to me that the problem with our nation is that we can’t talk to each other anymore. We are all locked in our cocoons of news and information, programed, literally, just for us by algorithm and raw data. We have difficulty reaching across the aisle, but have AI to introduce us to realities that never existed, but our internet-addled brains are quick to accept as true and probable.

But maybe, just maybe the problem in our country isn’t that we don’t talk with each other; maybe it’s because we don’t sing with each other.

Bear with me for a moment. We are a species built to commune. We come from ancestors who told stories around the fire, and ancients who told their stories of gods and man through narration and song.

We are social creatures who, generally, like the company of others, and seek experiences together. We are evolved from those ancient singers and storytellers. Our psyche is filled with drive to find commonality with the stranger, to take in the stories of friends, and embrace those moments. A group of people, sitting around a table talking, just talking, makes for an experience of common thought and bonding.

But, to sing together, to make music together, is to literally breathe as one. We become synced by the breath that we take and the sounds that we make. And that ain’t bad. Think about singing at church, and the feeling that flows into you as the words flow out. We are an emotional sponge, rejuvenated by the act of singing together.

This isn’t learned behavior. This is behavior brought from the soul. Listen to a baby learning to make sounds. Watch a toddler navigate their world, their new world, by tremor-filled step, and joyful spins and turns. See a baby, leaning on a table for support, begining to bob and swing to the sounds of music and conversation around them. Take in that five year old, so anxious to tell loved ones a story that they forget to breathe as the words pour forth from their mouth. Listen to young musicians who find the glory of harmony in the music made. Look with wonder as new generations find, learn, and perform the old stories, refreshed by old questions and new experiences.

This is the arts. This is lifeblood. To sing together, to make sounds with many as one, to move, to emote, these are the very base of who we are as humans. It is local. It is personal. Yet, in too many schools in too many communities, these have been taken away for expedience and cost savings. 

There’s an irony in this, worthy of a Shakespearean elegy. As we take away arts we see a more barren land with less in common. Schools and society, after all, is serious business. You can’t build industry from singing. You can’t lead nations by dancing. You can’t create jobs by standing on stage and pondering the life of a skull. Budgets are tight, there’s no room for niceties. Surpluses should be given back to the taxpayer, not wasted in something nonsensical that doesn’t help everyone.

A fifteen percent fiscal cushion is pragmatic.

So we take funds away, not all at once, but in unnoticed steps, with the certainty that, someday when budgets are flush, we will replenish those arts coffers.

And programs get weaker, and people wonder why good money is spent on mediocrity. 

And more unnoticed steps are taken, with the promise made that singing, and dancing, and playing instruments, and performing Sondheim is important, but we have serious stuff to worry about.

And boards start to thin the arts faculty and staff, as people wonder why there is so much disruption in our schools, and in our society.

And everyone wonders why we don’t talk together anymore.

And no one can figure out why we forgot to sing together.

After all, it’s not like singing pretty is anything important.