Try Not to Cry When You Hear This Song.
“The Man I Used to Be” by Jellyfish for #FreedomMusicFriday
The first time I realized what was going on in the Jellyfish song “The Man I Used to Be,” I got pretty choked up.
[If you want to listen for yourself BEFORE I give spoilers, proceed to the video below.]
I hope you remember me, I was your daddy once,
A man is talking to his child…in the past tense. What does that mean?
Wearing the sailor cap, and dirty nails.
To you I'm just a picture on your mother's mantelpiece,
A sailor. But a sailor the child does not know. Why?
Who chose to fight the good fight in time to fail.
A sailor who fought and failed. Is he a ghost?
I never thought it'd be so hard to see you grow so fast,
And turn into the man I used to be.
Yes, definitely a ghost. He died in war and now he—his ghost—is watching his son grow up. The realization still gets me every time.
And then it gets even harder to bear:
I save every moment I've reached out and almost touched you.
But they all fade away
He’s right there in the room, reaching out for a child he can never touch again. A child he barely knew…because he died in war.
I’m not crying—you’re crying.
This song has a different kind of anti-war message: it doesn’t much matter whether the cause was just or not; the end result is still the same: Children without daddies. Wives without husbands.
I hope you have more sense than I in matters such as these.
Medals don't mean shit when a family is lost at sea.
Into battle,
And in your shadow, your daddy loves you still.
Yes he does, yes he does.
This is my third #FreedomMusicFriday in a row with an anti-war message. Why?
I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just the order that songs occurred to me.
Maybe it’s because I am ashamed for all the times I argued in favor of a particular war, and turned the human cost into a mental abstraction.
Maybe because I feel fractionally responsible for my votes, and my words, in creating that human cost.
Maybe because I have finally realized that normal people do not start wars. ‘Authorities’ start wars. ‘Leaders’ start wars.
The result is that even the wars that end up being ‘necessary’ weren’t really necessary. The machinations of various leaders made them necessary. And then normal people get the privilege of fighting, killing, maiming, and dying in them.
I am not saying that human nature does not play a role in war. But there are ways to organize our affairs that make war more likely, and less likely.
And the first step in freeing ourselves from this scourge is to end the master-slave dynamic we’re stuck in.
For me, Substack is a job, and I cannot continue without your support. Help keep (most of) my content free by buying me the occasional cup of coffee!
#FreedomMusicFriday elsewhere on Substack:
I didn't' need to watch the video to tear up. Your commentary was enough to do it.
Could you imagine what the world would be like, how many less deaths there would have been, how many more people could have known their true potential if the precepts of this writing had been adhered to? I suspect we may have been to the stars by now if it had been so. REF: https://www.courageouslion.us/p/the-law-2024
And I am not a big fan of rap because most of the time I have to read the lyrics to understand what the rapper is saying. But this one has a woman singing in it too that isn't doing the "rap" thing and the words are fantastic... God We Need You Now https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYJBxlpfgxo We've been dancing with the Devil WAY TO LONG!!!
I have said many times that the people do not cause wars, the rulers do for their own purposes. But I always get a lot of flack for that. Regardless, one of my hopes for the future is the vision that if a country adopted a Collaborative Democracy that the people of other countries would see the advantages and it would spread. Unless attacked, Collaborative Democracies would not go to war because the people wouldn't be interested. Eventually that would bring real peace to the planet. It's my opinion that this is the only realistic hope for a peaceful humanity.