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LETTER: The day the music died

Imagine a world without the song I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Maybe it’s not your song, OK, there are thousands like it.
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Imagine a world without the song I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Maybe it’s not your song, OK, there are thousands like it.

Choose your song, the song that got you through a portion of your teens, or accompanied you to a campfire or grad party or walked you down the aisle. Now take that song away. Wouldn’t the world be an empty place?

Thirty years ago I stood in a sweaty room at the school board office with hundreds of parents. We were spilling down the stairs outside on a hot June night, fighting for the rights of our children to have music in their lives, at school. My kids are grown, but their lives were forever changed by music at school.

May I ask why we circle back to this inane place whenever cuts are proposed to our school budgets? Have we not figured out just how important this is to children? I don’t remember too much about math and geography, but I recall everything that took place in band and choir and the major productions for which I played in the pit band. That was where *life* happened!

I think we need to apply some COVID politics at the municipal level and somehow find money where there wasn’t any. Let’s not slash the very programs that mean the most to kids.

Connie Lebeau

Victoria