Another Perspective

Colorful music notes from Pixabay

For today’s Song Lyric Sunday, Jim asks for songs about civil rights, oppression, protest, revolution, or social change. Lots of bloggers are posting appropriate songs, but I decided to go a bit slant on the prompt today. Before I get to that though, I want to address a different topic, which is Jim's statement that he is giving up Thursday Inspiration (started by me way back when) and Friday Faithfuls, both due to lack of participation. I totally get it, and it's really frustrating to pour your heart into a piece of writing that is mostly ignored. That's how I feel about my Kindle books self-published on Amazon, each of which has at best a dozen sales. No one cares. No one is interested unless I give them away for free, and even then they won't actually be read and rated/ reviewed. They'll just get stuck in virtual libraries until the end of time. I know this because I had plenty of giveaways when I wrote romances as Anna. It's just the way of things now. By some magical alchemy, certain works, whether good, bad, or mediocre, go "viral" and get read and commented on by hundreds or thousands of folks, while other similar writing gets overlooked entirely. 

While many of us swear we "write for ourselves," we still want to be read. We aren't stuffing our bits of poetry into our sock drawers hoping no one finds it because we're scared of fame. We put our writing out here in public for a reason: we want to be seen. My first blog had loads of real views and comments ~ and I know they were real because this was before bots were scouring the internet to steal everything ~ and I liked it, even though when I reread what I wrote back then it makes me cringe. Things slowly changed however, and when I had my WordPress blog, most of the views and likes were fake. I would get a hundred likes on a post and two comments. I began posting more and more, but nothing helped; it just became more of the same. I ended up dumping that blog out of frustration, both with myself for getting so OCD about it and with other WP bloggers. Not to mention WP itself being full of glitches even when you paid for it, which I did. Blogger is full of glitches too, but it's free, and it has no stupid "like" button to fool you into thinking your writing is more interesting than it actually is. I deliberately kept this blog off Google to avoid dealing with spam and drop-ins who aren't actually interested in my words. It's worked ~ I get zero spam comments and very few marketing type comments.

Regarding Jim's posts, I have always enjoyed his writing, but often I have nothing to comment in reply, so I don't say anything. This is true for a lot of bloggers I follow, and I am not generally inclined to post a banal "good post" or suchlike when I really have no thoughts about it. Why am I jabbering on about this? I don't know. I was going to talk about a song, but I got tired of staring at my phone, so I opened my laptop, and here's this entire screen just begging to be filled up with my nonsensical words. How can I resist that? NaNoWriMo is coming up, which is the perfect opportunity to fill screen after screen with meaningless words, but I will probably pass on that as I have done the last several years. Though who knows... I do like to go on and on.

OK, so the musical Hair is a good choice to mine for songs on the SLS topic for today. One of the songs however is actually a criticism of the war protestors/ draft-card burners, and that's the one that came to mind. The main characters include Hud (Dorsey Wright) who lives in Central Park after giving up his former life when he received a draft notice. In the 1979 movie version, Hud's fiancée (Cheryl Barnes) shows up with their son, referring to Hud by his real name Lafayette and asking why he's abandoned them. Hud dismisses her, as he's now more loyal to the "cause" and the ragtag protest group that Berger (Treat Williams) formed in response to the Vietnam War (though they really are protesting the idea of going over to fight and die more than the war itself). His fiancée (not given a name) continues to beg Hud to come home and launches into "Easy to Be Hard" written by Gerome Ragni / James Rado / Galt Mac Dermot for the 1967 musical Hair and covered by Three Dog Night in 1969 to great success.

How can people be so heartless?

How can people be so cruel?

Easy to be hard

Easy to be cold

Oh, how can people have no feelings?

How can they ignore their friends?

Easy to be proud

Easy to say no

Oh, especially people who care about strangers

Who care about evil and social injustice

Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?

How about a needing friend?

I need a friend [...]

Have you known people like this? I have. 

Listen to the whole song here.