Don't Dream It's Over
-
Sixpence None the Richer does a cover of this 80s classic that I've been listening to lately. I first got the album that it's on sometime after September 11, and it became very meaningful to me. Although September 11 has taken on all sorts of baggage in the years since---thanks to the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture---at heart it was always what we knew it to be then: a group of murderous men who represented a culture that would like nothing better than to shut down Western culture, its freedoms, its openness.
Maybe I just have a melodramatic (and slightly apocalyptic) mindset, but I've always been aware of how things could go south. Looking at history, all it takes is an economic collapse, environmental disaster, military humiliation, for the dark forces to come out. People with nasty little minds are ready to turn on their neighbors, just itching for a reason to put people in their place. The world was shocked when Germany---cultured, spiritual Germany---became the source of a festering, pathological hatred during the years of Nazism. If it happened there, it could happen anywhere, given the right conditions.
Equally one can spend one's life in the embrace of a peaceful, easy life, secure in its stability, and then be confronted with historical conditions that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before. An influential book for me was The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie was an unmarried older lady living in Haarlem, Netherlands, with her elderly father and her spinster sister. She had a large happy extended family in their town and worked as a clockmaker along with her father. Think of it---reaching 50 or 60 years of age in peace and calm, Sunday dinners, quiet happiness. Settling into an equally peaceful old age. And then Nazi Germany. Within a few years, Corrie and her family, all devout Christians, were hiding Jews in their house, acting as part of a network of underground safe houses and increasingly under hostile scrutiny. Life became dominated by fear. And eventually she and her family were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Her father, her sister, and many other family members died in the camps.
All of which is to say that I have a fear of societal breakdown and the moral choices it would force me into. I like to think that as I get older, those choices would be easier to make. And after September 11, this song always made me think of a gay couple I know and how all of the forces of good in the world have stood up against the oppression:
There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There's a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you'll never reach the end of the road when you're traveling with me
Hey now hey now
Don't dream it's over
Hey now hey now
When the world comes in
They come they come
To build a wall between us
We know they won't win
-
Sixpence None the Richer does a cover of this 80s classic that I've been listening to lately. I first got the album that it's on sometime after September 11, and it became very meaningful to me. Although September 11 has taken on all sorts of baggage in the years since---thanks to the invasion of Iraq and the use of torture---at heart it was always what we knew it to be then: a group of murderous men who represented a culture that would like nothing better than to shut down Western culture, its freedoms, its openness.
Maybe I just have a melodramatic (and slightly apocalyptic) mindset, but I've always been aware of how things could go south. Looking at history, all it takes is an economic collapse, environmental disaster, military humiliation, for the dark forces to come out. People with nasty little minds are ready to turn on their neighbors, just itching for a reason to put people in their place. The world was shocked when Germany---cultured, spiritual Germany---became the source of a festering, pathological hatred during the years of Nazism. If it happened there, it could happen anywhere, given the right conditions.
Equally one can spend one's life in the embrace of a peaceful, easy life, secure in its stability, and then be confronted with historical conditions that would have seemed unthinkable a few years before. An influential book for me was The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. Corrie was an unmarried older lady living in Haarlem, Netherlands, with her elderly father and her spinster sister. She had a large happy extended family in their town and worked as a clockmaker along with her father. Think of it---reaching 50 or 60 years of age in peace and calm, Sunday dinners, quiet happiness. Settling into an equally peaceful old age. And then Nazi Germany. Within a few years, Corrie and her family, all devout Christians, were hiding Jews in their house, acting as part of a network of underground safe houses and increasingly under hostile scrutiny. Life became dominated by fear. And eventually she and her family were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Her father, her sister, and many other family members died in the camps.
All of which is to say that I have a fear of societal breakdown and the moral choices it would force me into. I like to think that as I get older, those choices would be easier to make. And after September 11, this song always made me think of a gay couple I know and how all of the forces of good in the world have stood up against the oppression:
There is freedom within
There is freedom without
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
There's a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you'll never reach the end of the road when you're traveling with me
Hey now hey now
Don't dream it's over
Hey now hey now
When the world comes in
They come they come
To build a wall between us
We know they won't win
-
posted by Anonymous at
12:19 PM
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