I just sent the following email to those with whom I celebrated New Year’s Eve last night:

Dear New Year’s Eve Party People:

I’ve uploaded my photos to Flikr here and to Facebook here.
Thanks very much for bringing in the New Year in glorious fashion.
I was honored that you liked my music.
I loved your great, positive energy.
When I was a young man, I walked into the Steppenwolfe bar on San Pablo Avenue in Berkeley and saw an old man dancing by himself. I said to myself, “When I’m an old man, I’m going to be like him, willing to dance by myself.” I guess I’m living up to that promise to myself.

Forever young,
Wade

The partiers included nine young people from the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Chile who work or volunteer with a non-profit similar to Habitat for Humanity. I played my multicultural playlist of dance music, followed by chilling out with Allen Toussaint and Cassandra Wilson. The young people, in particular, loved my music. One even asked for my email address so I could give him info on what I played.

It strikes me that those Latin young people, like many of the Mexicans I encountered, love their ethnic music, salsa and such. But much American music like early rock-and-roll and funk (like George Clinton) seems to elicit a more passionate reaction. There’s something about the mix of styles that emerged in the American South that touches the soul deeply.

Reviewing posts on Facebook this morning, I noticed the following quote by Howard Zinn that my sister Mary had re-posted after seeing it posted by someone else:

Consider the remarkable transformation, in just a few decades, in people’s consciousness of racism, in the bold presence of women demanding their rightful place, in a growing public awareness that gays are not curiosities but sensate human beings, in the long-term growing skepticism about military intervention despite brief surges of military madness. “It is that long-term change that I think we must see if we are not to lose hope. Pessimism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; it reproduces itself by crippling our willingness to act. Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. “We don’t have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world. Even when we don’t ‘win,’ there is fun and fulfillment in the fact that we have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile. We need hope. An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. “What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places-and there are so many-where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. “And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

This prompted me to re-post it myself with the following comment:

This is a beautiful statement, Mary. Thanks for posting in. Zinn was a wonderful man and a great writer, an inspiration to many of the early leaders in the civil rights movement even though he was White. One of the greatest honors of my life is when, in response to my “A Vision for a More Peaceful World,” he offered the following comment: “I like your ‘vision’ statement very much. I agree that a succinct description of what a good society would look like – something realistically grounded and achievable — is a necessary educational tool. I hope your statement gets wide circulation. I have often been asked to describe my ‘ideal society’ and yours is as good as I’ve seen.”

Today I move to another location here in Las Terrenas, where I’ll stay for almost two months before going to Arizona for one month of Giants’ Spring Training. My mood is great and I feel good about the progress I’m making on my autobiography and the two projects I plan to launch this month: the Guarantee Living-Wage Jobs campaign and the Personal-Social-Political Survey.