Why The World Should End!

Lyrics:

The world is coming to an end

The air is polluted, the oceans contaminated

The animals are going extinct, the economy’s collapsed

Education is shot, police are corrupt

Intelligence is shunned and ignorance rewarded

The people are depressed and angry

We can't live with each other and we can't live with ourselves

So everyone’s medicated

We pass each other on the streets

And if we do speak it's meaningless robotic communication

More people want 15 seconds of fame

Than a lifetime of meaning and purpose

Because what’s popular is more important than what’s right

Ratings are more important than the truth

Our government builds twice as many prisons than schools

It’s easier to find a Big Mac than an apple

And when you find the apple

It's been genetically processed and modified

Presidents lie, politicians trick us

Race is still an issue and so is religion

Your God doesn’t exist, my God does and he is All-Loving

If you disagree with me I'll kill you

Or even worse argue you to death

92% of songs on the radio are about sex

Kids don’t play tag, they play twerk videos

The average person watches 5 hours of television a day

And it's more violence on the screen than ever before

Technology has given us everything we could ever want

And at the same time stolen everything we really need

Pride is at an all time high, humility, an all time low

Everybody knows everything, everybody’s going somewhere

Ignoring someone, blaming somebody

Not many human beings left anymore, a lot of human doings

Plenty of human lingerings in the past, not many human beings

Money is still the root of all evil

Yet we tell our kids don’t get that degree

The jobs don’t pay enough

Good deeds are only done when there's a profit margin

Videos of the misfortunes of others go viral

We laugh and share them with our friends to laugh with us

Our role models today

60 years ago would have been examples of what not to be

There are states where people can legally be discriminated against Because they were born a certain way

Companies invest millions of dollars hiring specialists to make Little girls feel like they need “make up” to be beautiful Permanently lowering their self esteem

Because they will never be pretty enough

To meet those impossible standards

Corporations tell us buy, buy, buy, get this, get that

You must keep up, you must fit in

This will make you happy, but it never does for long

So what can we do in the face of all of this madness and chaos?

What is the solution? We can love

Not the love you hear in your favorite song on the radio

I mean real love, true love, boundless love

You can love, love each other

From the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed

Perform an act of kindness because that is contagious

We can be mindful during every interaction

Planting seeds of goodness

Showing a little more compassion than usual

We can forgive

Because 300 years from now will that grudge you hold against Your friend, your mother, your father have been worth it?

Instead of trying to change others we can change ourselves

We can change our hearts

We have been sold lies

Brainwashed by our leaders and those we trust

To not recognize our brothers and sisters

And to exhibit anger, hatred and cruelty

But once we truly love we will meet anger with sympathy

Hatred with compassion, cruelty with kindness

Love is the most powerful weapon on the face of the Earth

Robert Kennedy once said that

Few will have the greatness to bend history

But each of us can work to change a small portion of events

And in the total of all those act

Will be written in the history of a generation

So yes, the world is coming to an end

And the path towards a new beginning starts within you.

A long time ago I heard this song while I was browsing YouTube. It really left an impression me at the time, but since taking the class, it impacted me a lot more when I saw it again this weekend. Many of the different stanzas really hit home about what we have been discussing in class.

            “We can't live with each other and we can't live with ourselves

            So everyone’s medicated

            We pass each other on the streets

            And if we do speak it's meaningless robotic communication”

I am reminded of Pang and how he preached to de-tech our lives in this stanza. I feel that it’s completely true that we’ve come to the point where technology has overrun us and people are becoming sick from it. People develop sleeping disorders and need meds to control it. They have stopped knowing how to actually interact with each other because of meaningless things like Facebook and Twitter that they stare at all the time. Because of all this technology, we are becoming less human and our bodies are suffering from it.

            “More people want 15 seconds of fame

            Than a lifetime of meaning and purpose

            Because what’s popular is more important than what’s right”

This stanza reminds me of Nietzsche and his idea of living life without higher aspirations. People now a days crave for those 15 minutes of fame. They want to be immortalized on the Internet since now it is possible. People make millions of dollars for meaningless things like grumpy cat memes. The owner of that particular cat is rich because of something so small!

            “Technology has given us everything we could ever want

            And at the same time stolen everything we really need”

Eli Pariser spoke about filter bubbles and how we can’t hear/read what we really need but are shown what we “want” in his Ted video. This stanza reminds me of just that. Because of technology, a whole new world is open to us. We can view the news from the other side of the world while keeping in touch with a childhood friends who’s moved away for college. It has given us everything but in the same breath, many things come along with it that are horrible for us. Because of this and how everything is filtered, we never get the full picture of every story out there. All the information is trailered to us.

Finally, Heidegger’s three markers of falleness came to mind when I heard these stanzas:

            “92% of songs on the radio are about sex

            Kids don’t play tag, they play twerk videos

            The average person watches 5 hours of television a day

            And it's more violence on the screen than ever before”

This reminded me of his first maker of idle chatter where we talk about nothing but also do nothing really. We listen to meaningless things, we watch meaningless things and we talk about meaningless things. It is a boring life that we have come to live and people 100 years ago would be horrified about what has happened to us. His second marker came up a few lines later in:

            “Videos of the misfortunes of others go viral

            We laugh and share them with our friends to laugh with us”

This reminded me about how he spoke of curiosity and the meaningless information that we look into and then share and make it viral through social media. Instead of actively going out to do something meaningful, we sit back in our beds and “connect” by sharing stupid stuff with each other.

Overall, the video had a deep impact on me about how we need to change the ways our society works now or else we will not be able to survive on this planet. Everything is dying around us, plants, animals, the earth and even ourselves. Once we can see this and say that there is a problem, then and only then can we can actively all contribute to fix it. Like the wrapper said, all that is needed is a few small changes in ourselves and a little bit of love.