People Used To …
People used to get together round a fire, fishes were cooked songs were sang. Moonlight used to guide our way home in the dark. Do you find it hard remembering?
And still you people tell me life is easy to get on with but what I’ve got so far is enough to be going on with. People tell me that it’s so – I don’t know anymore, I don’t know.
…and so on.
Mood I got into yesterday continues. I went a bit introspective as well as interpretive, speculative and angry in looking back and forward.
Today let’s look forward, hopefully, through a wistful tribute to a much simpler time. Singer-songwriter Donovan Leitch, the first practitioner of Celtic Rock, delivers his message in an uncomplicated look-back to pre-industrial times if we take his lyrics literally, and whimsically, throwing back to an imaginary scenario, if we don’t. For did people ever really sit around a fire cooking fishes and singing as a way of life – of course not – but the point is more that a handshake was a handshake with no attendant deviousness.
It was a time of honesty. It was a time of dignity. It was a time of sexual equality. It was a much simpler but cleaner time because of the fact that it was much less dirty to begin with, a time based on caring and cooperation not on selfishness and competition where getting ahead trumps all else. Is it not possible for success to be attained on a universal rather than on a purely individual level? Otherwise the implication may be that our success is based on our competitor’s lack of same and we’ll give it everything we’ve got to beat him and thus “survive”. That’s what we’ve convinced ourselves we’re doing at any rate.
Imagine the level of success we could achieve if we all worked together at common purpose rather than the way things are done today for the most part which is we do what we have to to get ahead. When we were at the earliest stages of our socialization into the system, when we were developing the “me first” mentality, we were too young to think about what we were doing. It seemed cool to want to get ahead and we may have found ourselves doing stuff we would never would have imagined or seen ourselves doing only a relatively short time before, but if we ever even took the time to think and to realize what was happening, we were neither old enough nor wise enough to do anything about it. We may have begun to grasp the fact that it was pretty bad that we lusted after wealth, fame and power and that it wasn’t terrific that that was all we ever thought or talked about, but we just continued to go downstream with the the flow rather than waking up and learning what it takes to stand up and fight the fucking power. When you stop confronting and fighting authority, you become the authority.
Fight it with your brain, fight it with your pen and fight it with with your words. I am definitely harkening back to the Sixties now but I am in touch with myself. What the hell is wrong with the Sixties anyway? Solid values, free love, no worries about STD’s, plenty of good dope, conversation, caring, helpfulness, and caring helpfulness, understanding, and last, but not least, great music, rock and roll.
Do what you’ve never done before, go where you’ve never been. Change is life’s characteristic, bend and flow and play the game, lose your chains. (Courtesy Donovan, New Year’s Resovolution off the album entitled Open Road.)
Relax. Read the lyrics and listen to the music that accompanies today’s JuicyLesson, #91 (Can’t fucking believe that I’ve passed the ninety lesson mark! Who’d have thunk it? – just saying that. In fact, I’d have thunk it!)
“People Used To”
People used to get together round a fire
Fishes were cooked, songs were sang
Moonlight used to guide our way home in the dark
Do you find it hard remembering?
And still you people tell me life is easy to get on with
But what I’ve got so far’s enough to be going on with
People tell me that it’s so oh – oh
I don’t know anymore, I don’t know
People used to get together round a problem
Eyes were looked at tongues were truer
People used to stop and say how do you do
Do you find it hard remembering?
And still you people tell me life is easy to be going on with
But what I’ve got so far’s enough to be going on with
People tell me that it’s so oh – oh
I don’t know anymore, I don’t know
People used to spend an hour making tea
Easy easy was the rule
People used to pause to think and contemplate
He who hustled was the fool
And still you people tell me life is easy to get on with
But what I’ve got so far’s enough to be going on with
People tell me that it’s so oh – oh
I don’t know any more, I don’t know
Peace out.