SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS MUSIC TO THE EXTREME — plus one

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

Last night I dreamt about the perfect protest song. In my dream I found it on You Tube, but I never actually got to listen to it! I want to know what my subconcious mind was trying to tell me.

So when I woke up this morning, I went in search of it. I never found it. But I did find something else online that was interesting. Some people had made a compilation of what they thought were the 50 best protest songs ever (confined to songs with English lyrics, of course. I am sure there are a lot of great protest songs written in other languages — GUANTANAMERA written by Compay Segundo jumps immediately to mind. See https://lyricstranslate.com/en/guantanamera-guantanamera.html-25 — as does the music of Ladysmith Black Mombaso from South Africa!) But moving on.

I once wrote a protest song or two (lyrics only, I am tone deaf and have…

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BLACK HISTORY MONTH — MARCH 13, 1985

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

Say her name KATRICIA DOTSON, also known as Tree Africa!

On the day after Mother’s Day, 1985, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , 11 people were murdered by the Philadelphia police. Why? I cannot tell you all the reasons.

To begin, 100s of Philadelphia officers of the law surrounded an occupied house in a black area of that city, and fired 1000s of rounds into the house. But that was not enough. They then had a helicopter drop incendiary devices (bombs that caused fires) on the house. The house caught fire, and a few people managed to escape. But most did not. They could have been saved, IF they were still alive by this time. But the Police Commissioner would not allow the Fire Department to put the fire out. In fact, he said to the Fire Commissioner, “Let it burn!”

The story did not begin that day, nor did it…

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A SAFE PLACE FOR TRANSGENDER AND NONBINARY PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

A Canadian member of the House of Commons is asking all Canadians to sign the petition he is sponsoring:

Petition to the House of Commons

Whereas:

• The world is becoming increasingly hostile to transgender and nonbinary individuals;
• Transgender and nonbinary people’s rights to live as themselves are being restricted and removed in many places;
• This includes the so-called “Western democracies” which have historically been presumed safe;
• The United Kingdom is revising their Equality Act to exclude trans people from its protections;
• More than a dozen American states have enacted or are considering legislation eliminating or criminalizing gender-affirming care; and
• Canada has prided itself on being an inclusive, tolerant, and welcoming society for everyone regardless of gender identity or gender expression.

We, the undersigned,residents of Canada, call upon theHouse of Commonsto extend to transgender and nonbinary people the right to claim asylum in Canada by reason of…

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THE DAYS THE MUSIC DIED

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

February 3rd, 1959 is generally known as the day the music died, partly due to the song American Pie by Don McLean. But there were many days before that upon which rock personalities died, and certainly way too many days since.

I, of course, cannot list them all here, but I can give you the web address where Wikipedia has tried to collect a list of the names, dates, places of death, and where possible the causes of death for known rock (or rock n roll) personalities, grouped in decades, and starting in 1950 and going forward.

I do not expect anyone to know all the names, these lists use a very very broad definition of rock music, as well as the connections to rock for some people. But I am not going to dispute any of them. I certainly do not have even a smattering of the information being…

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WHEN IT IS SAFER TO BE HOMELESS THAN IT IS TO BE AT HOME

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

The title for this post came to me while watching a television drama last night. A lead character was trying to convince her mother to stop living on the streets, and to find a home where it was safe.

Suddenly I was 15 years old again, and the police were dragging me home screaming after I had been caught after running away from home. In those days, the early 60s, there was no homeless problem, at least not one acknowledged by society. There were, however, homeless people whom I had tried to live with, because it was safer living with them than it was to live at home with a human monster. But the police didn’t care, my father owned me till I was 16, and it was their duty to take me back home, even knowing what was going to happen to me after they abandoned me there.

But…

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A SIDEWAYS LOOK AT THE NUCLEAR FAMILY — REBLOG

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

In past blogs, I have mentioned three of the worst offenders to human happiness and well-being, my Three Gs: God, Gold, and Government. (Since I wrote this, my blogging friend Jill from Filosofa’s Word has convinced me to add a fourth G — Guns! I happily but sadly do this.)

By god, I mean any religion or philosophy that feels its members are better than the members of any other religion or philosophy, and will fight to the death to defend their supposed superiority, and they do it in the name of God, or Naziism, or Communism, or (and especially) Free Enterprise.

Free Enterprise also fits well with the G of Gold. Gold stands for wealth, money, corporations, global industries, national or global conglomerations, consortiums, and whatever else Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels predicted would come to pass, and eventually the proletariat or industrial slaves would rise up and slay…

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YES, HUMANS CAN CHANGE! YES, WE ARE EVOLVING! BUT AT WHAT COST?

I woke up a hour ago, literally shaking with sheer disgust from a horrifying dream. I will spare you the details, although a part of me wants to share the terror of what I watched happen in front of my dreaming eyes. It was too much even for me, and I had to force myself to wake up, I wanted so bad to barf. I will just say: Baby Seal Hunt, and leave it at that.

Why the hell would I have such an inhumane dream? What could it possibly mean. And after thinking about it, I could only come up with one reasonable explanation. Over the past few years I have heard so many people, including myself, asking if life is worth living, because nothing seems to change. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the wealth inequity just grows and grows. But while that is the root cause, saying it out of context does not tell the whole story. The rich are the hunters, and we are the baby seals!

We may not be being outright slaughtered, like the baby seals were, quickly but cruelly beaten to death in front of their horrified and heart-numbed mothers so as not to damage their valuable outer skins with bullet holes or knife slashes, their carcasses left to rot uselessly on the blood-soaked ground, but slowly, inexorably made to suffer through the years until our bodies give out on us and we succumb to death, the final liberator. (Yes, that was a long sentence, like the wealthy sentencing us to a lifetime of pain. It’s called poetry.)

But we changed! Because large numbers of people got together and demanded we stop slaughtering baby seals. And that was just part of the whole fight against the lucrative fur industry which had prospered for centuries! While the wealthy still want to wear fur, We the People have brought them down off their high horses. We rose up in numbers too big to be ignored, and we accomplished mostly stopping the slaughter of our fellow animal siblings just to please the uncaring parasites who had us prey on the animals for their pleasure. We changed the world, in part.

So, why are we not rising up in numbers too big to ignore in the fight to save our planet. Destroying the planet is even more inhumane than slaughtering baby seals, because it is slowly slaughtering all the higher lifeforms on Earth. Everything from aardvarks to zebras, and from flowers to trees. Bacteria and other microorganisms may survive, and fungis, but everything else is at risk! Are we really going to allow the wealthy to set nature back 4 million years in their pursuit of money?

i sure as life hope not!

WE MUST RISE UP!

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

I woke up a hour ago, literally shaking with sheer disgust from a horrifying dream. I will spare you the details, although a part of me wants to share the terror of what I watched happen in front of my dreaming eyes. It was too much even for me, and I had to force myself to wake up, I wanted so bad to barf. I will just say: Baby Seal Hunt, and leave it at that.

Why the hell would I have such an inhumane dream? What could it possibly mean. And after thinking about it, I could only come up with one reasonable explanation. Over the past few years I have heard so many people, including myself, asking if life is worth living, because nothing seems to change. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the wealth inequity just grows and grows. But while that is the…

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NOT SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS MUSIC

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

Lying in bed, awake, at 4:00 AM, strange thoughts come into my mind. Whatever conscience, read social restriction, that I have just disappears, and I think back to my hippie years from 1966 forward (I am still a hippie in my mind) but really only until about 1972, when I had to admit the hippie dream had been lost as a social force. Nowadays, our numbers are dwindling due to attrition (How many people are still alive who can’t remember where they were during the Summer of Love?) but I still exist, and while I can remember, I just want to say, those years were the happiest years of my life, bar none…

For certain, we lived each day without a thought to the future. And we wished everyone could live that way too. We had watched our parents try to live safe, unexciting lives, using alcohol and valium to…

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REBUTTING THE DEATH OF ATHEISM

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

This post was originally written by myself as a response to a post by Chad Hensley. Mr. Hensley’s post itself was a review of a book entitled Is Atheism Dead? by Eric Metaxas, whom I had never heard of, and now have no need to ever read.

This post begins with two quotes, taken from Mr. Hensley’s blog, which he attributes to Eric Meraxas as being main points in his argument that atheism is dead. As you will read, (and anyone familiar with my writing will already know) I do not agree with him. Atheism is alive and well (I do not say this directly here, but only by inference, just so you know.), and belief is what needs to die if we are going to save ourselves from ourselves.

So, on with my discussion:

♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

…in a world that was created for purpose and meaning.

This world…

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THERE WAS APARTHEID, AND THERE IS STILL APARTHEID — IF WE CHOOSE TO LOOK AT THE TRUTH

Ideas From Outside the Boxes

On Sept. 12, 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko was murdered by the South African government. They considered him the biggest threat to their apartheid way of life. Little did they know that he had already accomplished his goal of raising the consciousness of the black people of South Africa. It took another 17 years before Apartheid was officially ended, but it would not have happened without the hard work and great insight and organizing ability of Stephen Biko.

I have been singing his praises for more than 40 years now, but few seem to really care. So, when I found the video below, I just had to post it. It is only a summary of his life and work to make South Africa free, and does not present the real struggles he went through daily, but it is something.

So why do I keep coming back to the life and accomplishments…

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