JPF Home Page Forums General Messages General Message Forum WE'RE ALL BEING SCREWED

Sorry to those who responded as I didn't have time to read them on this one. But I did want to respond to Barry...

Sure, Barry, everything you said was true. But tilting at windmills does nothing. Writing songs about the issue is only SELF serving unless people are CLAMORING for what you have to say in them and as far as I am aware, that is not the case and not likely as the quantity outweighs the need a million to one or perhaps 100 million to one when it comes to lyrics.

Until you get out of your house, into the community and make real human direct connections, you can't make any difference. Not from your platform on the computer until you build a very large following and even then you have a headline at most to capture attention and then a few lines to keep them reading. Good luck with that approach too.

So what CAN you do? I don't know you, but if you are competent enough to go and play for little kids, that is always an easy door to go through. Sing songs that are engaging to little kids and also have a broad and easy message to understand about right and wrong (not adult topics, but just knowing what is right and doing what is right). We currently live in a society where there is no real punishment for crime on any level. Murder, cold blooded and pointless, often gets single digit years in prison. Other crimes get little or no prison time. Things like shoplifting do not result in ANY punishment even if someone is caught on video and arrested on the spot (they won't be pursued if they get out the door by police 99 percent of the time and never by employees in or out of the store so it is fair game to steal whatever you want. And the police do not bother because the retailers will not press charges. 10% theft is simply the new cost of business. It used to be 1% or less, but new day, new lower standards and truth is that employees, who see how easy it is, steal far more than customers do so most security at stores is actually set up to monitor employees. They don't press charges or even try to catch customer theft. And they fire any employee who tries to stop them. Sad fact but necessary. Lawsuits from 100% guilty thieves scare companies far more than the theft itself.

For kids, you either already have more (in North America) than 99% of the rest of the world so you're fat and happy, OR if you happen to be among the most underprivileged people or just bored kids who want to take something before their parents can buy it for them, you can steal all you want and all your friends do it so you're a chump if you don't join them.

We're SOOOOO lucky to live in this crumbling society, because as quickly as it is devolving, it is STILL by far the best level of wealth and options in human history even among our poor. Anyone not "poor" in the USA (and other thriving Western countries, you know who I am talking about) live better than anyone else, as a mass, in the history of the world. Most serious crime is based on BIG money pawns in the drug turf wars. But really it is just an excuse for aggressive bored boys going through macho phases where parents don't exist literally or in practice (or are more corrupt than their kids anyway) and so they act like tough guys, where prison is a right of passage and not a deterrent at all for most.

So... back to you. What are YOU going to do about it? Making music is a totally SELF INTEREST activity. You make music because you must and anyone saying they are doing it for others as if people are lined up begging for it are crazy. It's not true. NO ONE has that ROCK STAR appeal anymore. They don't want to know what a superstar musician thinks about things, they want to know what jeans they wear.

You can also get involved by finding a single LOCAL problem and learning about it and coming up with a solution that you can work hard to deliver. THAT will make a difference. Little else will. It's just bloviating to almost no one because almost no one is listening. You must show them through personal action and often even without them following you, you must do the work anyway and see the project through and hope that your instinct that it was a problem that needed to be solved was correct and you've made things better rather than worse.

Or you can rant on a message board. How's that going towards solving any of the world's problems?