Monday, April 9, 2012

Where Are The Protest Songs

The world has gone horribly wrong and there are no protest songs. Where are the Neil Youngs, the Arlo Guthries, the Sex Pistols? We have Lady Gaga and boy bands singing banal, meaningless drivel. Where are the protests in the songs, where is the concern that the youth are about to be given a life of debt and less?

My guess is that they are playing in clubs and small venues and building their base. Whether you believe things are bad or do not, you should still know that many people are unhappy and many of the young ones are unhappy. How come we cannot hear their voices? If they can sleep out at Occupy events then certainly they are writing protest songs, why don't we hear them? It is because the media does not play them, they play Lady Gaga (who I actually believes has a good voice).

Look at the media you are presented with and understand that it is not reality, it is a show. Politics and media are shows that are put on to lead and entertain. The entertainment is meant to reinforce your biases and bigotry. What you are being shown is that it is all staged. That is what reality tv teaches you and you come to believe that everyone is a liar so that you will not hear the truth.

Do not give up, do not give up on looking for the truth. I am not going to say it is easy making sense of this world, I do what I can to explain things to others, do the same. We all know things are not right, the question is what is right. What should we be thinking about and doing?

What is Normal? Not these days.

When you read the news, watch television or go to the movies, when you are exposed to the mass media, it seems that the world has gone insane. I know many people have just shut down and stop paying attention, it seems that it is too much for them to take in and process. Obviously this is not true for my dear readers.

I think the biggest problem is that we have lost our moral compass. People are fearful of what they do not understand and who can understand anything going on in the world anymore. Over the weekend I attended an event at a University at night. While there I had to help someone up because they had passed out in the street. I saw a number of people openly groping each other in public and one of the people who was there with me had a young lady call down from a balcony and ask him if he wanted to have sex. We did not know any of these people.

Throughout the evening we heard screaming, carrying on, ambulances and general craziness. It was a world with no boundaries, privacy or restraint. This is not the old guy talking about the kids these days. It was the kids these days that first got me looking at globalization. It was the kids who are going to run this world that I was seeing, the ones who can afford to go to an expensive University. I also went to college and saw parties, what was different was that I was told it was this way every week.

In the past, people from the lower classes were wild and the people from the upper classes had to maintain more dignity. That isn't true anymore. The guy that passed out, he was with two women. One of the women was semi-comatose and the other seemed okay. I asked her if he was going to be okay and she said, "oh they are like this all the time, I have seen them much worse". Worse than passed out so bad that even shaking and talking will not wake him?

Rome fell for a reason, nobody cared and everyone just wanted to enjoy themselves. They had convinced themselves that the purpose of life was joy. When the barbarians came, there was nobody willing to fight back. The old saying is that Rome fell from within before it was taken from without (or something very much like that). The United States and the west are collapsing from within.

I saw my mother in law over the weekend. I did not see my ex-wife. My mother in law had always been a staunch Republican. She told me she had become a Tea Party member and had even lost a friend because of it. She said it didn't seem to matter who we voted for because nothing changed and that is not how it used to be. I was proud of her for seeing it. She even mentioned how the government spies on us (a relative of hers that really does know had told her how it was done).

Where are we going? When will people work together again? The bible talks about Israel. At certain times in it's history the people turned from the Lord and did what was right in their own eyes with no concern over how others looked on it. Those were the times when Israel was taken into captivity by other nations. The west is the same today. Today people don't just do what they want, they post it on Facebook and are happy to let you know even when they are committing a crime.

We had the big party with the housing bubble and then it burst and we have the hangover as we have to pay for the party, as the economies all go sour. Kodak has declared bankruptcy and is about to give out over $8 million in bonuses. Huh? Not long ago Arnold Schwarzenegger pardoned a convicted murderer because it was the son of a political friend and Schwarzenegger said that is what you do for friends. There is no shame and nothing that moves us other than personal reward, happiness if you will.

I will say something good about my ex-wife. When her sister left her husband for another man, she tried to tell her it was a bad idea. I have heard that she has had second thoughts about her own actions with regards to me. We all make mistakes and that is just life, the question is whether or not we learn from them or glory in them. The people that are supposed to be our leaders no longer care nor worry about their mistakes, nothing has changed even after the bubbles have burst and the economies have failed. Those who can benefit from the failures are happy to, nobody does good.

When my mother in law told me that she was a member of the Tea Party, I told her that the Tea Party and the Occupy movement should join up with the areas that they do agree on. She looked puzzled for a second and asked me about them. I told her of my experience in Los Angeles with them. Congress has the lowest level of trust in the history of the country; but, we cannot agree on who to put in office to replace them. The left and right dislike their own parties and have tried to start new movements; but, they have not reconciled on what they do agree on.

Just some thoughts from a crazy old man.