Vow of the Unarmed Voice

VOW OF THE UNARMED VOICE I make this promise: I will challenge the glorification of guns, murder, retaliation, and manufactured menace wherever entertainment disguises them as evidence of strength. I will use what I actually possess— poetry, rhythm, language, wit, reason, music and nerve. I will challenge the loudest apostles of weapon worship without borrowing their weapons. If your image of power requires a gun in the photograph, I question the power. If your reputation requires another human being afraid of you, I question the reputation. If your masculinity requires a body count, I question the man. If your music cannot survive without selling death as decoration, then I will challenge the music with music. Bar against bar. Thought against threat. Creation against destruction. I will not manufacture my own martyrdom. I will not require somebody else’s bullet to authenticate my conviction. My continued existence will be the harder protest: to stand unarmed before the mythology of violence and refuse, year after year, to worship it. Let nobody mistake peace for passivity. It takes little imagination to destroy. My weapon is the thing a weapon cannot manufacture: an idea. So bring your catalogue. Bring your mythology. Bring every cinematic pose of invincibility. I will bring a microphone. And should this argument survive me someday, let the record show that I did not spend my final breath engineering my destruction. I spent my living breath attempting to make destruction obsolete. I do not need to die for peace to prove that I meant it. I intend to live long enough to make the argument impossible to ignore.