Danger Voice

I’m not sure what to say about this one, but said a lot anyway.

A consumerist society only survives through the destruction of education, with the express purpose of preventing people from learning how to be critical consumers of information. That’s the only way to ensure that the pyramid maintains a broad enough (commodified) labor base to support the vastly smaller number of selfish, narcissistic plutocrats at the tip. Outright slavery used to take care of that, and still does in some places.

People have been conned into voting for plutocrat promises of vouchers that they could use to get private education for their special needs children… only they’re not being told that private schools aren’t obligated to provide those services in the way that public schools are. Some charter schools are sponsored by districts, and are allowed to function only so long as they support IDEA in the same way as their sponsor… so they require that parents drop services from the IEP as the price of enrollment. The specific abuses that are allowed do vary somewhat by state.

This continues to happen because the xenophobes keep getting away with it. They count on other-centered people to be reasonable and non-violent; similarly, they count on them to care about the feelings of others, and so not wanting to hurt them.

And yes, you can generally count on that, but only to a point (with rare exception). But now they’ve gone beyond that point. They’ve gone too far. I’m not feeling so reasonable and non-violent anymore. I’m not interested in protecting the abusers from harm.

So I decided that a protest anthem was needed. I have a colleague in special education who is an avowed punk metal head banger, so I thought that he might enjoy a song in that mode. I don’t know much about that style of music, so I listened to a bunch of famous bands and songs… and then just gave it a shot.

I didn’t anguish over the rhyming because it seemed like a trivial priority compared to the clear expression of the problem. Same with keeping the verses’ syntactic structures perfectly consistent. This is the first time the that I’ve built up the lines of a chorus in each of its successive occurrences, where I wanted those steps to convey the notion of increasing anger.

This song has me thinking that maybe the ones with truly explicit lyrics should all go on the Exprimi Diem album.

We’ll see. Maybe this will always be a single.

Here are the lyrics.