The Story of THE WHITE RING
(as revealed to the Bottom of the Hill audience, San Francisco,
14 April 2001)

Don't let anyone tell you different...these are times we can be proud of.  And The White Ring is here to remind you of how true that is.

Times of freedom.  Times of faith.  Times of personal wealth.  But time to take stock.  Who are we?

We, as Americans have come to live together as one people. Of course, that was along time ago when we were young.  As a nation, because of our founding fathers.  But each year, people like us see more and more reasons why that fragile and tender fabric that holds all of our peoples together gets tested.  By strife.  Riots, wars, emotional blackmail, secular humanism...why?

The men of The White Ring banded together in a time of crisis, during Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War, in the far east.  So far away from our own soils.  We knew we were there for a mission, a mission faced again and again by our brave fighting men and sometimes women...the cause for freedom.  We pushed hard against Saddam's army, wiping sand from our eyes and even emptying it out of our boots sometimes.  But it was worth it.  Because the proof, as we like to say, is in the pudding, and that massive and unified fighting force won.  We learned some things about putting down our enemy.

So we came back to the states, having joined together as brothers in music.
America welcomes it's heroes, and so it wasn't hard for us to rejoin society.  We worked hard and invested wisely in our own futures.  We built up families.  We gave our wives all the love they'd missed while we were away with others.  And as our music grew, so did our awareness of how much America had changed while we were gone.  Our Commander-in-Chief, President George Herbert Walker Bush, was showing signs of weakness at home.  Liberal interests had defeated forward-thinking school voucher initiatives.  Drug and alcohol abuse was on the rise.  Crime was up.  Gays and lesbians were begging to join the armed forces.

WHY do special interests always try so hard to bring us down?  If we knew that answer we'd be scientists, but we're not (thank the Lord!), we're musicians.

Well, we took one hard look at this scenario and knew that all we'd learned and all we'd been working towards was threatened.  And we responded the best way we know how: with our music.  We found lots of other like-minded friends in the East Bay and pretty soon we had all built up quite an alternative Christian music scene.  Our first record was a 7" flexi disc which was mailed to over 460,000 Bay Area homes over Easter weekend, 1993 ("Monkey Song" b/w "Ecumenical Movement") and the response was sensational.  Here was a group of determined men who weren't going to let the secular music industry stop them from delivering the message.  That our record can still be found in so many local thrift store's years later is a tribute to our strengths and the timeliness of our words.

And now, by coming to our concert, you yourself have pledged your support in ways we are truly thankful for.  Maybe you will learn something from our songs.  Maybe you will be made angry.  Well, we were angry once, but now we're happy.  Sometimes you need to face the cause of your anger to become happy.  To become truly liberated.

What started in West Oakland has since become a White Ring circle on an international scale.  Here are some additional resources:

http://www.geocities.co.jp/HeartLand-Gaien/3671/

http://hometown.aol.com/godshaer/whitering.htm

http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/forestknollses/projects/olympics/entrance.html

http://www.nadir.org/nadir/periodika/jungle_world/42/35a.htm

http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/Geom/concircl.html

http://www.floorstransformed.com/ceramic_tile/messages/1810.html

You can write the White Ring at whitering@monopause.net.  We get alot of mail so understand if we are slow to respond.  WE READ EVERY LETTER!

 
 


We have a special friend, someone who should be a friend to all: Gianna Jessen.
How can tissue have a head?  It's incredible, but read about her story and share for yourself:

http://members.tripod.com/~joseromia/gianna.html

http://www.gladart.com/gianna/