COMMENTARY: We shall—we can, we must—overcome

NEW YORK — To see how we got into this economic mess, enter the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle, go up to the fifth-floor home of Dizzy’s Club, and admire The View. The View has launched countless dreams of making it in New York City. A Trump Tower to the left and the grand […]

NEW YORK — To see how we got into this economic mess, enter the Time Warner building on Columbus Circle, go up to the fifth-floor home of Dizzy’s Club, and admire The View.

The View has launched countless dreams of making it in New York City. A Trump Tower to the left and the grand hotels of Central Park South to your right. Ahead of you, Central Park stretches to the east before it meets the glittering high-rises of the tony Upper East Side.

Nearby apartments sell for tens of millions. The View radiates worldly success.


Yet the price of obtaining a slice of The View is a steep and costly one: wild rides on Wall Street with other people’s money; a tone-deaf insistence on hefty bonuses as millions lose their jobs; a Wall Street culture of “Eat What You Kill.” Indeed, The View can be intoxicating.

But I’m not here for The View. I’m here for a concert by four bluegrass musicians from Oregon called The Student Loan, who started as undergraduates in Ohio and now are bound for Asia on a State Department educational mission. They perform in front of The View but seem to ignore it. Their love is music, not real estate.

Ten minutes later and six blocks away, I enter the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center and follow the sound of violins to the third floor. I find a stage packed with young string players sawing away at standard early-learner repertoire.

They launch into “We Shall Overcome.” Parents and friends sing along. I draw closer. It’s Opus 118 Harlem School of Music, the courageous strings program made famous by the film “Music of the Heart,” starring Meryl Streep as Roberta Guaspari, the school’s founder.

Here, light years away from multimillion-dollar apartments and the Wall Street fat cats who buy them, aspiring musicians display real courage. They start with nothing but wood, four strings and a bow, take the leap of learning, make simple music, and then together perform America’s anthem for all people.

They don’t leverage other people’s money. They don’t risk, fail and walk away with $18 billion in bonuses; they risk, fail, and keep on trying. Few of them are likely to earn a dime from their music.

New York City is like this. A small cohort of highly educated and aggressive professionals live extraordinarily well, while the vast majority work equally long hours just to get by. They live paycheck to paycheck, dreading annual rent increases, hoping to earn in a year what Merrill Lynch’s now-disgraced former chief spent on an office rug.


Sooner or later, each of us must deal with this dichotomy: strive for The View or a nearby sliver of it, or strive for something less tied to wealth, like a musical skill that can lead others in song.

In his famous anthem to striving in “New York, New York,” Frank Sinatra sang: “I wanna wake up in a city that doesn’t sleep, and find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.”

The anthem played by Opus 118, meanwhile, began as a gospel hymn in 1901, became a favorite of Appalachian coal miners trying to unionize, and blossomed into a song of determination sung by activists for civil rights, peace, justice and freedom. It speaks to real courage.

Our culture should stop admiring the rich and instead join in anthems of life. Fabulous wealth isn’t success, and getting by isn’t failure. The coal miners’ refrain — “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday” — points to our deeper humanity.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)

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