The mission of the Build the Bridges Project is to cross all manner of perceived and real divides between people.
It started with a song.
When I heard the shouting “Build bridges, not walls!” I loved the message. For some people it’s purely infrastructure. Like, we need more bridges for cars, trucks and trains and the border wall is just a waste of money. I’d actually like to turn most of the bridges into pedestrian and bicycle bridges.
For me, the kinds of bridges I’m most interested in though, are ones between people and between perceived differences, ideological or otherwise, such as the erroneous notion that we are separate from Nature. You might guess that I would love to take down the US/Mexico border walls, but I would also like to build a bridge between me and anyone who feels we need more walls. I’d like to take down musical walls, walls that tell people they aren’t good enough to enter these hallowed halls of music.
We didn’t go to the Trump rally as protesters or supporters. We went to sing. When people shouted, we sang. You don’t need to listen in order to shout. But if you don’t listen when you sing, you will be out of rhythm and out of tune with everyone. You can even have a conversation with someone and not listen. But to sing with someone, you really gotta listen. And people sang along with us.
So when someone shouted “Build bridges, not walls!” “Build bridges, not walls!” “Build bridges, not walls!” and the other side shouted “F…. you f… you f… you” we started singing “Gonna build the bridges… take down the walls…” and people sang along, and soon people were dancing.
We kept singing this new song at rallies and before long it had verses. Each verse is exactly the same except for one word. Go to the song page to see the lyrics in English, Spanish, Maasai, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. More to come.