There is blood on the hands of this cute little Technopoly, the thing that a small number of people ponder as an intellectual curiosity. The Technopoly entity is responsible for wars, the recklessness that each succeeding group of children take on, racism, and poverty conditions. So just how long are the sociologists going to stand at their podiums and preach to the choir?
There are those who are more inclined to take these issues beyond the hallowed halls of universities. In fact, their concerns about society came about at much younger ages. The medium of some of those of whom I speak is music. The other person who touched my education the most during college speaks from and for a world that is far away from both social scientists such as Neil Postman and your everyday working professional. His name is Greg Graffin and is the lead singer of Bad Religion. The man has spent twenty years on stage, offering advice and warning to lost teens while the rest of society has not. He is a well-educated student at a Northeastern university and has provided a lot of inspiration to an underground culture.
Members of the punk world are fearful of the future. They see a world of plastic fads, the pursuit of individualism at the expense of the community, disastrous war between the haves and have-nots, and leadership that does not care about “the little people.” Crime, evil, and corruption are saturating the capitalist businesses and governments. Third World nations are at their mercy. Many in this underground culture, along with others, are thoroughly convinced of government conspiracies and that our leaders HATE them. The sociologists might cringe at the super-charged rhetoric and anger that some of these singers deliver to oceans of similar-minded young people- tackling basically the same issues as the sociologists. It is just from their point of view.
The social scientists will never get anywhere talking about it in closed rooms. The professional is haunted by the pressures of time and work, and is unaware of the responsibility to explore but don’t know where they came from. The angry activist sees the suppression of freedom and chains on his feet. All of us are seeing from our own perspectives and experiences. We are all seeing the same thing.
“Kyoto Now” by Bad Religion:
It’s all about prescience but not the science fiction kind
It’s all about ignorance, and greed, and miracles for the blind
The media parading, disjointed politics founded on petrochemical plunder
And we’re its hostages
If you stand to reason, you’re in the game
The rules might be elusive, but our pieces are the same
And you know if one goes down, we all go down as well
The balance is precarious as anyone can tell
This world’s going to hell
Don’t allow this mythologic hopeful monster to exact its price
Kyoto now!
We can’t do nothing and think someone else will make it right
You might not think it matters now, but what if you are wrong?
You might not think there’s any wisdom in a fucked up punk rock song
But the way it is cannot persist for long
A brutal sun is rising on our sick horizon
It’s in the way we live our lives
Exactly like the double edge of a cold familiar knife
And supremacy weighs heavy on the day
It’s never really what you own, but what you threw away
And how much did you pay?
In your dreams you saw a steady state, a bounty for eternity
Silent screams
But now the wisdom that sustains us is in full retreat
Don’t allow this mythologic hopeful monster, isn’t worth the risk
Kyoto now!
We can’t have vision for the future if it can’t be fixed
Alien
We need a fresh and new religion to run our lives
Hand in hand
The arid torper of inaction will be our demise
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