If one has the aptitude,  talent and/or insufferable ego to draw attention, then please use it to expose the system of conditioning that we have all experienced in one form or another. Let's shake off the denied truths, and sort our acts out. It can be done...

Draw attention to what unifies us, to what is real and be an encouraging voice. Make the music you feel is most beautiful to you. Trust your ears. Above all be real, with self and with audience 

Folk Music is inherently political in that it's very basis rests upon the trust placed in the individual, the demands of integrity, the care;  that is what makes it so exciting, so robust a medium of wisdom, knowledge, experience. Fluid, creative, changing over time, not as fashion, still holding the communal wisdom, celebration. That's why folk music must SPEAK.

In my eyes, if I have the stage, I have a responsibility as a parent and an adult, one who has 'set aside childish things'  to NOT use that sacred space for self glorification or seek celebrity, and to determine to ever serve that space, by empowering resistance to, and recovery from conditioning, my prayer that the genuine may live as genuine, naturla as natural, and thus community is to be built, by good, diverse and serious people. Location by locale. Village by hamlet. Towns and even cities.

What else is there to do?

As Bill Hicks once said, to those who "work" in marketing ;   "YOU are Satans Spawn! Kill yourselves! It's not  a joke. I mean it! Kill yourselves!"

Such a great piece that one!

Fearless.