Make It Shine for You

What a 106-year-old song can teach the pro-democracy movement

In mid-May, I gave a version of these remarks to Flint Hills Resists, in Council Grove, Kansas. Thinking they might be more generally useful, I recorded this video — quickly, just before dashing to the airport. With apologies for my limited musical abilities, here’s some advice for our pro-democracy movement… from a 106-year-old show tune.

This is a reminder to take care of yourself. As Tricia Hersey writes, “Rest is resistance.” And it is! Not just because it allows you to fight another day, but also because, as Hersey says, “Grind culture has normalized pushing our bodies to the brink of destruction. We proudly proclaim showing up to work despite an injury, sickness, or mental break. We are praised and rewarded for ignoring our body’s need for rest, care, repair.”

And we can’t approach activism this way. I know this because I have tried. I pushed myself too hard during the first 100 days of the regime. To stay in the fight, I need to maintain a better balance between rest and resistance. So, like all advice, this advice is at least partially for the advice-giver.

Part of sustaining ourselves is doing things that sustain us. One thing that sustains me is music — listening to music, compiling playlists, and learning to play and sing songs that I like. One such song is “Look for the Silver Lining” — a 106-year-old show tune that has some good advice for us right now.

You may be thinking. “This is not a political song. These are just words.”

But hear me out.

1: “Look for the Silver Lining” was written in 1919. So, its songwriters — Jerome Kern (music) and Buddy DeSylva (lyrics) — had just lived through a world war and a pandemic. The pandemic — the so-called “Spanish Flu” — was even more lethal than the war, which (for a quarter century, at least) was known as “the war to end all wars.”

To come up with as hopeful a lyric as “look for the silver lining” after living through all that is a remarkable achievement. If they can find hope in dark times, so can we.

2: The song is about adopting an orientation towards possibility. It does not say “Every cloud has a silver lining.” It says “Look for the silver lining.” It does not say “The sun will come out tomorrow.” It says “Somewhere, the sun is shining. So, the right thing to do is make it shine for you.”

That is good advice. We must always look towards what we can do. Because there is always something we can do — however small.

3: The only thing we know about the future is that the future is unknown. Since it has not happened yet, no future is inevitable or predetermined. This song made its debut in a 1919 musical that was a flop. The songwriters brought it back in a 1920 musical.

The song was not only a hit. It became a classic. There are beautiful versions by Judy Garland, Tony Bennett, Leslie Odom Jr., and Chet Baker — his is my favorite, and I’ve embedded it above. There are versions of the song recorded this year.

106 years ago, Kern and DeSylva could not have known that their song would become a jazz standard. Indeed, I know nothing about the musicals in which the song first appeared. I don’t know much about lyricist Buddy DeSylva either. But I still sing his words. As do many others.

What you do today — what we are all doing right now, in this fraught and dangerous moment — creates ripples into the future.

We have to keep going, and we have to keep faith that what we are doing will have a positive effect, even though we cannot predict when the effects may be realized — even though we do not know which of those actions, or which series of actions, will prove to be the decisive ones.

So, let’s keep creating those ripples.

And remember to take care of yourselves, to take care of each other, and to keep the faith.

I’ll see you soon—