Pickin' Up Good Vibrations

ooh can’t pitch the woo

cup or sup with my baby

’cause “It’s Too Darn Hot”

June 14th sun beat down on a celebratory crowd at the No Kings protest in my hometown.  Arriving with a friend almost an hour early, ice cubes melting in my Brooklyn Dodgers #42 baseball hat, we nestled among democracy’s fans already packing the sidewalks and knolls abutting both sides of three-laned highways.  In every direction, looping along side streets, crossing intersections: signs and laughter…honking and waving travelers in cars and 18-wheelers…handouts of water and fans…veterans with flags and children with grandparents…rolling wheelchairs and folding stools…strolling police officers and chatting peacekeepers…spontaneous singalongs of “America the Beautiful” and “We Shall Overcome.”        

Good Vibrations—Revivifying Campaigns

A Muslim musician from Queens, born in Uganda to Indian parents and U.S. citizen since 2018, progressive socialist, proponent of voter registration, skilled organizer of volunteers knocking on almost a million doors, attentive listener, social media guru, recipient of relentless Islamophobic ignorance and hate, and the underdog winner of the democratic primary for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani posted this message on July 4th: “America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished.  I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better.  To protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.  Happy Independence Day.  No Kings in America.”  He earned over 20,000 individual campaign donations, 75% of them less than $100.00.  Mamdani’s mayoral website proposes an overdue American revolution, promises inside-out/bottom-up change, displays diversity among his supporters, and serves as a blueprint for transformation.  Affordable housing, rent-control, government-run grocery stores, free mass transit, raising the minimum wage, opposing and protecting the vulnerable from masked insecurity agents, upholding LGBTQIA+ rights, providing both universal healthcare and pre-school education.  Copy it.  Adapt it.  Revive democracy.

Requiring 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot for November’s gubernatorial election, Abigail Spanberger collected 40,000 just to be sure.  Wizard of congressional bipartisanship from 2019-2025, the first Democrat in over fifty years and the first woman elected to the House of Representatives from Virginia’s seventh district, she now speaks with constituents around the state on her “Span Virginia Bus Tour.”  Her career includes federal law enforcement and CIA undercover work along with investigations into cybersecurity threats and child predation.  An unflappable and optimistic listener, her flawless campaign offers Virginians a fresh start.  Spanberger’s running mate for lieutenant governor, born in India and U.S. citizen since 1989, Ghazala Hashmi inspires voters as the first Muslim woman in the country to run for statewide office.  For decades a community college English teacher, Hashmi’s participation in the January 2017 Women’s March on Washington fueled her passion for political activism, and in 2019 she was elected a state senator to Virginia’s General Assembly.  Revive Virginia.  

Good Vibrations—Championing Democracy

Meet staff members of the progressive “Run for Something” organization which welcomes a goldrush of some 50,000 newcomers motivated to run for local and statewide public offices.  Most candidates are under forty—many women, colorful skintone variations, significant LGBTQIA+ representation, and widespread geographic reach.  Sparked in November 2017, the organization’s numbers fast-forward since the 2024 election. 

Pop the question hip-hopped by the Black Eyed Peas since 2003.  “Where Is The Love?”  Their decades-ago song predicted our need for non-corporate news coverage—legacy media’s cave-in to autocracy spirals: “Wrong information always shown by the media / Negative images is the main criteria.”  Drama distracts—trauma attracts.  An election looks like a joke (!).  “And if you never speak truth then you never know how love sounds.”

MSNBC reporter Jacob Soboroff published in 2020 what Rachel Maddow calls “the seminal book on the child-separation policy” at the US/Mexican border: Separated: Inside an American Tragedy.  Soboroff is executive producer of the film “Separated” directed by Errol Morris.  Reporting regularly from the frontlines, the LA native’s new book releases this coming January: Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster.  He continually covers LA’s armed invasion by US troops in compelling interviews.  Watch as Soboroff showcases the violent arrest by masked kidnappers of weed eating landscaper, Narciso Barranco, father of three US Marines.     

Good Vibrations—Grabbing Second Chances   

Ribbit.  “It Doesn’t Take Much” poet Margaret Gibson realizes after she spots the dead frog lying on a stone near the entrance to her house.  What happened to this possible emissary from the wetlands, she wonders, prepping the still limber frog for burial in a paper bag casket.  A bit later she lifts the bagged corpse a second time.  The frog “is rustling, is jumping— / alive!”  She releases the frisky body in shady comfort among the pond’s cattails—now gladdened, she gets back to her life.     

Twenty-second Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith shares fascination with her father’s vocation as an engineer on the still orbiting Hubble Telescope.  The ever-expanding cosmos, Smith astonishes, “My God, It’s Full of Stars, (Part 5).”  She recalls her embarrassment for her dad and his coworkers when the blurry first images appeared in the Hubble telescopic lens.  Then.  They took a second look.  “The optics jibed.  We saw to the edge of all there is— / so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.”  Ribbit.  

take that second look

frog legs kicking, eyes seeing

blanketing of stars

Brian Wilson, a beach boy, waded with difficulty through lifelong health problems.  His ride on sonic waves leaves generations surfing his soundtrack—its rhythms and lyrics beat in our hearts.    

Barrier-busting in 1966, this 2005 performance of Wilson’s “Good Vibrations” thrills a Berlin crowd almost as much as it delights the band members.  Look at that smiling and clapping boy from the beach, his seasoned hands vibin’ and excitin’ while performing his youthful harmonic experiment.  “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations a-happenin’ with her.”  At stoplights everywhere, musical innovation still blasts from car radios.  Crank it up!  “She’s giving me the excitations (oom-bop-bop).” 

Paul McCartney, inducting his friend Brian into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, speaks in 2012 for all of us undone and rewon by Wilson’s “God Only Knows.”  Beatle Paul: “He wrote some music that made me cry…there was just something so deep in it…reaching down into me….  I think it’s a sign of great genius to be able to do that with a bunch of words and a bunch of notes.  Thank you for making me cry, for doing that thing you do.” 

“God only knows what I’d be without you.”  Honeyed confidential.  “You never need to doubt it / I’ll make you so sure about it.”  Pitty-pat—pitter-patter.   

Two versions—Wilson’s perfection.  First an “old California folk song” and then a trumpeting at the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize Concert.  Elvis Costello and The Brodsky Quartet.  John Legend and Zara Larsson.  Heartbeats—pit-a-pat.  

god only knows and

you must be sure about it

oom excitation