Tag: protests

Friday’s Theme Music

I remembered the Killers’ song, “Human” (2008) this morning. The song has never been a favorite, and its success surprised me. Different tastes, right?

Many were enamored by the line, “Are we human, or are we dancers?” The line evolved from a Hunter Thompson throwaway line about the United States raising a generation of dancers, afraid to step out of line.

The whole thing came back to me as I noted, with some pleasure and approval, that young people were heavily involved in the Black Lives Matters protests. One of the most disheartening parts of protesting in my fifties and sixties was the absence of young people. Didn’t they care? Or were my values so out of step with their values?

Older generations often malign younger generations. My generation, the boomers, were no different. It takes time to filter the world and yourself. Bursts of rebellion against expectations and norms are required and expected, but the way each generation finds to act out and express itself remains different. Social media is the thing now, not taking it to the streets, so the protests are a throwback, old school.

Yeah, rambling. Not sufficient coffee yet to form coherent sentences. Here’s the music. See if you can spot the line (hah!).

Are we human
Or are we dancer?
My sign is vital
My hands are cold
And I’m on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human or are we dancer?

[Bridge]
Will your system be alright
When you dream of home tonight?
There is no message we’re receiving
Let me know, is your heart still beating?

h/t Genius.com

That is all.

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

This is one of those days when I awoke and for some unknown reason have some song snatch in the stream. Does this happen to others? Am I the only one with a playlist in my head that goes click when I get up and start thinking?

Sure, I’m not. These aren’t the same as earworms, mind you. Sometimes they are earworms, which is a song that’s stuck in your head. There’s a different feel to earworms than just a the mental jukebox flipping something on. These songs aren’t necessarily stuck, just present. I’ll heavily bet that they are related to some auditory cortex wiring, though.

Aside: remembered this WebMD post from a few years ago and dragged it into the light: “Songs Stick in Everyone’s Head”. It mentions reasons related to neurosis and obsessions, and the cognitive itch. As a writer, I become obsessed; that’s a large part of being a writer for me, getting obsessed with ideas, concepts, stories, and characters, and trying to wring them out of my head and into the world in a way that the rest of the world might understand.

Today’s song, “What’s My Age Again?” is from 1999 and a group named Blink-182. I really liked the album name: Enema of the State. Good play on words? With many people and orgs battling ‘the state’ for a variety of reasons, maybe that’s the cognitive itch that supplied my stream with this song.

Or maybe the cognitive itch is the song’s year, 1999. Seems like things really began spinning weird with Bush v Gore and the Florida hanging chads (which could be the name of some kind of group) in the next year. 1999 was a good year for me in my world. Maybe my mind lauds it as the last good year.

Well, here it is. The song, I mean, not my world. It’s a video. I’d not seen it before today, but it’s amusing to watch three naked men (except shoes and socks) running around.

That is all.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

A bit of contra programming for myself today. Reading the news and watching videos of protesters losing eyes from police firing rubber bullets into crowds sickens me. Some respond, well, the protesters shouldn’t have been there. I disagree. They have the right to assemble right included in the bill of rights. Why huge police forces must escalate with violence is the disturbing part. Fighting fascism, the fascists say in classic double-speak.

It’s all hard to handle, which kicked the Black Crowes’ cover of the song by the same title into my music stream. Otis Redding wrote and recorded the song, and it’s been covered by many since the song’s first release in 1968. I enjoyed Otis Redding’s version and found the BC’s cover was a fatter, slightly up-tempo version that works for me. So here it is, from 1990.

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Monday’s Theme Music

War.

Climate change. Natural disasters.

COVID-19 pandemic. Rising deaths.

Black lives matter. Police brutality. Corruption. Protests. Riots. Looting. Tear gas.

Murder hornets. Asteroid heading for Earth. Forty thousand year old worms dug up, thawed out, and living again.

2020 is seen by many to be a year of worsening situations. Many read something new happening, fill with dread and ask, “Oh, no, is another disaster about to strike the planet?”

Chuckling to myself over this today, Europe’s song, “The Final Countdown” (1986) entered my musical memory stream.

The song is about leaving Earth, but you know, just pause a mo’ and shift words around, and it’ll work for this year.

If we need a theme song for this year, maybe this is it. Maybe it is the final countdown, not to leaving, but to another crisis.

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Sunday’s Theme Music

A quiet day for me, providing an interlude for reflection. After watching the news, contemplating history and contrasting them with current events, Neil Young’s song, “Old Man” (1972).

Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.
Old man look at my life,
I’m a lot like you were.

Old man look at my life,
Twenty four
and there’s so much more
Live alone in a paradise
That makes me think of two.

Love lost, such a cost,
Give me things
that don’t get lost.
Like a coin that won’t get tossed
Rolling home to you.

Old man take a look at my life
I’m a lot like you
I need someone to love me
the whole day through
Ah, one look in my eyes
and you can tell that’s true.

Lullabies, look in your eyes,
Run around the same old town.
Doesn’t mean that much to me
To mean that much to you.

I’ve been first and last
Look at how the time goes past.
But I’m all alone at last.
Rolling home to you.

h/t to AZLyrics.com

I picked this acoustic version for its simplicity, and because Young is young in it, and alone, unvarnished, on the stage with his guitar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An2a1_Do_fc
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Saturday’s Theme Music

Fed the cats, used the restroom, woke up (yeah, that was the order, to the best of my recollection, your honor), and realized I was humming “My Hero” by the Foo Fighters (1998). Thought it a good song for these times, when people need everyday heroes to manage commonplace matters.

[Chorus]
There goes my hero
Watch him as he goes
There goes my hero
He’s ordinary

[Bridge]
Kudos, my hero
Leaving all the mess
You know my hero
The one that’s on

h/t to Genius.com

Find a hero. Find yourself a hero. You don’t need to worship them; just support them.

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Are You Outraged?

Someone else wrote a blog titled, “Are You Outraged?” And I thought, am I outraged?

Let’s see. I was born in 1956, eleven years after WW II, but while the conflict in Korea was happening, and as the U.S. was getting drawn into Vietnam.

The Cold War was going strong. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. were ready to launch nukes and drop nukes at the slightest provocation.

1960 began strong, with John F. Kennedy getting elected. He promised to put a man on the moon. Meanwhile, protests and riots began. The 1960s were full of blood and smoke. Kennedy was assassinated; so was his brother. And Martin Luther King, Jr. Many blacks were lynched and murdered. Battles were fought over segregation, “Separate but equal”, and desegregation.

As races fought for equality, so did women, but the Equal Rights Amendment stalled.

The arms race sucked up resources and attention. Korean and Vietnam were ‘ended’ as conflicts, but more conflicts sprang up. War has not ceased in my lifetime, despite the fall of the U.S.S.R. Instead, it’s intensified.

As has the battle for equal rights and the ideal that skin color, sexual orientation, religious preferences, and genders should not matter, that we, as a nation, are only as strong as the weakest among us, so we must protect them.

The battle for the environment has intensified, too, and with it, the understanding that this is one world, and once again, in order to survive, we must survive together, and protect our planet, or we may all suffer, and many of us will perish, bringing our civilization to our knees.

These seem like self-evident truths, but instead, another war has arisen, this one about what constitutes truths, facts, science, and evidence. The way that numbers and words are spun to create division and distraction spins my head.

Am I outraged? Fucking yes. After a lifetime of this, I thought we’d be further advanced. But as I watch the police brutality and government response to the murders and protests, echoes of history reverberate. I’m reminded of the tanks in Hungary in 1956 as the Soviet Union crushed an uprising.

I’m reminded of the Watts riots.

I’m reminded of Tienanmen Square in 1989.

I’m reminded of the Berlin Wall.

I’m reminded of Selma and Montgomery, Alabama, and Detroit, Michigan.

I’m reminded of the American Civil War.

I’m reminded of the rise of Solidarity in Poland.

I’m reminded of Ferguson.

I’m reminded of the Democratic National Convention in 1968.

I’m reminded of Kent State in 1970.

I’m reminded of countless sit-ins and marches against war and for peace, against injustice and for equality.

I’m reminded of so many events that I’ve seen and read of in the narrow focus of my short life, and I’m reminded of so many who live in fear and suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to serve and protect.

Am I outraged?

I watch the news, play the viral videos, and read the articles this week and wonder why so many fight against others’ equality. I wonder how so many can be so cruel to fellow humans. The outright cruelty and disregard demonstrated as police officers spray, beat, shoot, and mistreat their fellow citizens, their fellow humans, horrifies me.

Am I outraged?

I am sickened. I am saddened. I am furious.

Yes, I am outraged.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is an Queen song from 1970, “Keep Yourself Alive”.

Keep yourself alive was my reflection to watching protests grow into riots as police and others escalate the situation. It’s been an ongoing mutter in my head as we deal with the novel coronavirus situation. Why practice social distancing, masking, isolation, and good hygiene? Well, to mitigate spreading the virus, to gain time to understand it, to gain time to allow our healthcare systems the chance to cope with it, and well, to keep ourselves alive until a vaccine can be found.

Thought it works well on this first day of June in the year of the riots and COVID-19.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Watching the riots remind me of my youth. Born in 1956 in the U.S., we had riots frequently in the sixties.

This month’s riot began when George Floyd, a black man, was apprehended by police, and died, allegedly for something involving forged documents.

Death by police officer is surely the response for such a heinous suspicion, right?

Watching police brutality in 1971, Obie Benson questioned what he was seeing. With Al Cleveland and Marvin Gaye, the thoughts were put into a song that became a Marvin Gaye hit. At that time, protesters were standing up against the Vietnam War. Police, demonstrating the restraint that we’ve come to know well from them, waded in, resulting in what became known as “Bloody Thursday”.

We’ve seen it many times; protests arise. Unless you’re white and armed (see Michigan this year), the police are gonna come hard. (Didn’t help that the POTUS (ever thoughtful and considered in his response) said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” quoting the Miami police chief from the 1967 riots).

The government is by the people and for the people, until the people speak up against the government (unless, again, you’re armed and white in the woke United States) (witness the frequency of armed white males killers with automatic weapons being peacefully apprehended), then look out, people.

Marvin Gaye’s song says it well:

[Verse 1]
Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today, yeah

[Verse 2]
Father, father
We don’t need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some loving here today

[Chorus]
Picket lines and picket signs
Don’t punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what’s going on
What’s going on
Yeah, what’s going on
Ah, what’s going on

h/t Genius.com.

BTW, this post was created with the new WP editor. Initial question: WTF did it need to change? Evolutionary improvements, I understand. I thought the other was an intuitive system. Now they want me to ‘insert blocks’, which include such common blocks such as ‘paragraphs’. Christ.

Their little floating block editor jumps in front of text, forcing you to navigate around it to see WTF is going on.

Grrrr.

Here is “What’s Going on”.

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

A classic of my youth by Marvin Gaye, I often feel this is the perfect song for the times. But as I’ve aged, read, and learned, I’ve recognized it could be the perfect song for many times and situations.

From 1971, here is “What’s Going On.”

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