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It's a line in a song that has always caused me to stop and think. Or maybe just stop and feel.
They played it last week up at the University of Utah, at the memorial service for dancer, choreographer, teacher and wit Rowland Butler. Which, because he was a dancer, choreographer, teacher and wit, was less of a funeral and more of a great show.
Among other performances was one by the local Odyssey Dance Theater, done to the music of The Beatles' "Let It Be." It's the fourth verse that always brings me up short.
"And when the broken-hearted people
"Living in the world agree
"There will be an answer
"Let it be"
Sir Paul had it right.
Look around the world and back through history, and it seems clear that so much of what is wrong is broken-hearted people who are so tied up in themselves they don't notice that others are broken-hearted, too.
The truly evil people can't get away with explaining that they were just unhappy. But it does explain their ability to get whole nations to follow them.
Hitler wasn't sad. But he was granted power over a once mighty nation that was broken-hearted over what it had lost — treasure, foreign colonies and trade and, mostly, self-respect — in the aftermath of the First World War.
He promised to make them great again.
In the process, of course, millions more hearts were broken. And many of those who survived tried to heal by founding their own new nation, helped by other people who were trying to prove they weren't totally heartless, even though they had abandoned the Jews of Europe.
It was an action that, in turn, displaced and made millions more people, who already lived where this new country called Israel was built, feel abused and abandoned. We are now coming up on 70 years of two peoples in the Middle East claiming that their hearts are more broken than are the other person's, justifying terrorism on one side, endless occupation on the other.
Where The Beatles' prophecy came to pass was across the Irish Sea, in Northern Ireland. There warring factions of people — who, to the rest of the world, looked more alike than even so many Sneetches — finally got so tired of breaking each other's hearts that one day they just stopped.
In the United States, we turn away from racial and other forms of hatred and abuse when, and only when, we see how much the other person hurts.
The most moving passage of Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" wasn't political or religious or economic. It was the part where he explained how heart-breaking it is for a black man to have to tell his child she can't go to the local amusement park because it's segregated, or has to stand silent as white people disrespect his mother. So much so that it amounts to acts of psychic violence.
Rising levels of empathy for gays and lesbians changed the way the law treats them and their families. Putting ourselves in the shoes of immigrants, and their children, is the only thing that will protect them from massive deportations that our descendants will neither understand nor forgive us for.
But the people who do, or vote for, the things that break the hearts of certain groups generally have broken hearts of their own. And it is neither fair nor effective to tell them to just get over it.
They see the world change. Standards they have clung to for generations erode. A belief that the superior station they once took for granted has been taken from them and, more shattering, from their children. (Even when their children are fine with it.)
Folks who wear "Make America Great Again" hats are almost all wrong. But they are people, with hopes and dreams and disappointments and hearts that can break, and they are wrong not because of what they want, but because of would-be leaders who rationalize healing their hearts by breaking someone else's. By going back to a time when, in their imperfect, sometimes desperate, memories, their hearts were whole.
George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, was pretty broken up when they canceled Star Trek.