The past couple of months I've been trying hard to figure out how I could have been so naive about the state of the world around me. How I could think/believe that the blatant racism rising up in the Tea Party movement would/could never happen. Part of it has to do with the fact that I watched as this country elected a Bi-Racial man as our president. But the other, I realized is rooted in a moment from my childhood...
I can clearly remember the first time I heard, grasped onto and truly understood the song "Imagine" by John Lennon. I was sitting at home in front of the television and this video came on...John Lennon sitting at a piano in a dark room with Yoko Ono by his side....as he sung this song asking us to Imagine this world she moves away from him opening the curtains on the floor to ceiling windows...letting the light flow over him...all in white. The song captured me and I was fully caught in the imagination of a child wanting the world to be better.
From that moment on I think I've had my Rose Colored glasses on...not seeing the world in it's true form but in an askew form of a world working to become that perfect world Mr. Lennon was talking about. Only seeing the good, refusing to look at the bad and trying my best to believe that the words that captured my heart at that young age had captured everyone else's...I was wrong.
The problem is truly that the song speaks beautifully about a perfect world. And we as humans can't have a perfect world because we are not perfect. We are angry, hate-filled, spiteful liars. We steal, kill and cheat each other without hesitation and we can't truly accomplish everything he speaks of because we don't really have it in us to. I know now that I was so influenced by hope that I lived on a make shift cloud. When I took my glasses off to watch in full glory the presidency of Barack Obama, I realized sadly that although we've moved in great steps toward a better world, we have also fallen so very far short of being anywhere near where we should be.
I don't think that John was saying that this world would one day be perfect, what I think he was saying, is that if we were to all sit down and imagine ourselves in a perfect world then we would come out of the experience wanting to make the world around us better. Some did, but others didn't catch that point. We live in a global market...a global community where the coffee I buy in the morning directly effects someone in Africa or South America. So you'd think that we'd be at a point in 2010 where there'd be no hunger, no child dying of preventable disease and no people living with illness because companies are charging them ridiculous prices for medication. But in 2010, we still have all this and more!
My mind is blow, my heart sadden and my eyes full of tears at the state of the world. And at the fact that people are so selfish and stupid that they'd rather protest, spit on and ridicule others than to really help them. That's what wrong with this world and that is why we will never be the world that John Lennon sang about. Tragic and unnecessary!
Here's a link to the video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAHFrLAxzM
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment