It is always frustrating to me that the baseball season goes on for so long and the football season is so short. Baseball wears out its welcome and football leaves you wanting more. I’m sure that there is a message in this unevenness, but I have never found it. Just frustration, and there are quite enough frustrations in life without adding this to them. Both sports are supposed to be games, but I think that really they are obsessions. Habits that start at birth and continue throughout our lives, sometimes unnoticed. Addiction might be a word also used to describe the hold that these games, and others, have on most of us. Actually obsessions and addictions are with all of us throughout our lives. We just deal with them in different ways and call them by different names. Habits. Predisposition to whatever. Genetics. In our DNA. An inheritance from our ancestors, etc. All euphemisms for being on a merry-go-round with something. Is this why so many people get hooked on drugs which are by their nature habit forming? Are we that easily lead? Whatever the answer is to this problem, the problem itself has been around for a long, long time.
It is this predisposition that has gotten many societies in trouble when they are easily lead by someone with promises whether outlandish or vaguely possible. The promises are usually about the ideal, the utopia, world peace, and anything and everything based on wishful thinking. And these are not necessarily bad in themselves. It is when they are mandated that they become dysfunctional. When enough people become seduced with idealism, the herd factor takes effect. Everyone must follow the mandate or else, and it is this “or else” that becomes the flypaper that binds until it is too late to change. There can be nothing worse than waking up to reality when you are stuck in the flypaper and someone else has the flyswatter. If you like to read history, there are examples too numerous to mention to illustrate this point. A very few societies have awakened in time to fight the seduction and the inherent mandate before it was to late to change. Most haven’t, and at that point there always has been and always will be blood and violence as the only way to bring back reason and rationale. Think for a moment about the traps and seductions that we now deal with on a daily basis.
Technology. The computer, the world wide web, phones that connect globally in an instant, television (a window into almost everything), even transportation. What does all of this have in common? Communication and control. And this is the seduction. Communication is good and ideal, and also fraught with promises. But with all of the above comes control. Not by the user even with a password, but by the leader. Keep in mind that the leader is not necessarily the government or any section of the government. With the kind of technology that we now own, it actually owns us. Anyone could be the leader, insulated by layers of digitation. Once in place, the person or persons only has to operate the invisible puppet strings for everyone to dance to. And by then it is far too late to do anything but lament. Demonstrating, marching, carrying signs, tweeting, or destruction of property are all ineffective and infantile wasting of time.
Will music of any kind help to prevent any of the above? Music initially is a good part of the problem. It goes hand in hand with obsessions and addictions. But it can also communicate on a global scale with a power strong and enduring enough to prevent mass control of societies. There have been times when musical styles were the outlaw against tyranny. The underground voice of reason of downtrodden people and whole populations. Currently it is a good part of the problems we now face. But by using the very technology that can be dysfunctional, even evil, music has the power to make great and extensive changes. In the right hands. And now is the time for music to wake itself up and find ways of preventing the potential disasters that loom ahead. The media has lost its credibility and its power. Music hasn’t. Yet. Wake up now and actually listen to the words that are being pounded incessantly and hypnotically into our brains and the undeveloped brains of our children. Insist that it clean up and straighten up. The only thing that really counts in music today is numbers. If you use these as leverage, music can and will change and cease to be part of the problem. Rock on and on and on…!