We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it-Billy Joel
I love that Billy Joel song. I cry when I hear it because it’s sung with such passion, despair and anger. Talk about capturing the spirit of your time.
He says he wrote down “everything that happened in my life”. He was born in 1949. The power of the song lays in it’s obviousness. Here’s this guy, looking at his life, where he grew up, how he grew up, (who knows really) and the point is he wasn’t involved in all the happenings he sung about. He was probably raising hell, playing music, getting with girls, living his life, but look at everything that had happened and was happening and did happen. It’s like he was re-watching his life as a movie and at the same time raging against things he basically had no control over.
This is a disconnect.
I feel like Billy Joel cut a final line between people and happenings. Like the line was getting thinner and thinner and the line was our connection to what went out in our society, culture, community with ourselves. The line was the connection. Billy Joel was signing about the recognition that he didn’t have the connection anymore but he could still the events and that there were, once, connected. It’s as if he sung and as he sung, the connection grew weaker and weaker and finally, it snapped.
We wake up today. With a world that moves all around us and yet what is our connection to the events that shape our world? Even more, what is our perception of that connection? Do we even have one? And if we don’t, then what is it that we have?
If we don’t have a connection to the world that is happening around us, meaning if we don’t perceive our connection to the world that’s happening around us, meaning on earth, what do we have? If we pick and choose our connection, seeing certain things as connected to us and perceiving our participation in certain things but not others, what do we have?
What do we have?