This is the last day of the #30DaySong Challenge, and I’m very glad I decided to revive it again. I had forgotten how therapeutic regular blogging could be, especially when writing about music. I want to thank all of you, readers, who came to the blog for the first time (or returned after a long time) to participate in the Challenge with me. Preesh.
By the way, if you liked the songs I covered this month, check out the #30DaySongChalleneg 2018 Spotify playlist I made. You can hear them all again and again!
My pick for today is Sara Bareilles‘ “Brave.” It reminds me of myself, in part, because I think I am brave. Truth be told, though, bravery is a virtue that was a long time coming for me. I wish I had someone relay the message of this song to me when I was much younger. Don’t run. Stop holding your tongue. Maybe there’s a way out of the cage where you live. Those are inspiring words, yes, but they can also be life-saving ones.
The other reason this song reminds me of myself is because, now that I’m older (and braver), I find myself in the fortunate position of being able to regularly offer encouragement and life-advice to younger, not yet brave, people. Of course, I can never know what specifics kinds of baggage students are bringing with them when they sit down in my classroom for the first time, but I regularly see all of the hesitancy, insecurity, and reluctance that is typical of people in their late-teens and early-twenties. Fear of appearing stupid or uninformed. Anxiety about the higher-ed rat-race. Confusion surrounding what they really think or stand for. In more than a few cases, a suffocatingly-heavy weight of shame about who they are or want to be. I remember all of those feelings. They are incapacitating, silencing, and very, very difficult to overcome.
Bareilles’ song really captures exactly the message that I want to impart to my students: Say what you want to say, and let the words fall out. Honestly, I want to see you be brave. The real threat on college campuses these days, contrary to what you may read in the papers, isn’t “PC culture.” It’s intellectual cowardice.
(And laziness.)
Admittedly, when Bareilles’ sings “let your words be anything but empty,” my muscles tighten a little. It is often the case that when students finally do “let the words fall out,” what ends up in the shared space among us is grossly uninformed, sometimes injurious, sometimes hateful. I don’t think it takes a lot of bravery to say those things, but I think it takes a lot of bravery to counter them, and we need to give young people more practice doing that. In my experience, ignorant hateful ideologies end up being just as cowardly and weak in the public space of discourse as they are impassioned and strong in the private space of hearts and minds.
Which is why it’s important to remember that in Bareilles’ account, bravery accompanies truth, not lies. I want to encourage my students to be parrhesiastes, to find the courage in themselves to speak to truth to power.