I recently told a friend about the Brother Esau/Wine to Water charity concert. He wondered out lout what Doc Hendley would think about the Grateful Dead's music being connected to his cause. He (my friend), is apparently a follower of Hendley's on Facebook. He claims he often sees Hendley engaged in "conservative" activities, like going to NASCAR races. I suppose, more than anything, it's this way of thinking--this constant pitting of left versus right, liberal versus conservative, this knee-jerk division--that I seek to escape/transcend--and perhaps Hendley and others feel the same way. A good charity shows so many of our political/ideological differences to be trivial, easy to cast aside.
There was a great article in The New York Times this morning about Sean Penn's charity work in Haiti. The writer begins the piece by giving you a million reasons to be skeptical of Penn, most of them having to do with his political opinions and his personal life. But who can deny what Penn's accomplished in Haiti, working closely through his aid group (Jenkins/Penn Haitian Relief Organization) with one of his favorite enemies, the American military? When you're dealing with extreme poverty, all issues of celebrity, taste, ideology, your opinion on the war in iraq--they go out the window. As Penn himself says: "You can have a barter system, you can have advanced capitalism, you can read Ayn Rand or Joseph Stiglitz. I don't care, because I don't understand it anyway. What I do understand is that if your neighbor is screwed, you've got to help him."
Sean Penn and Doc Hendley in Haiti:
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