Too Many Narrators
We ended up with way too many narrators.
But not to worry,
Because “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is now under 140 characters.
Congratulations.
Our generation was able to make ‘Revolution’ into a vintage plaid shirt, stuffed in a trash bag.
All we had to do was buy one from a thrift shop and give it a filter and a hashtag and voila.
We all wanted so badly for John Lennon to rise from the dead,
Just so he can endorse the circular framed glasses and the iPhone 10.
We all wanted to believe that he would launch is conscious folk duet project with Ono and not sellout,
And we act surprised when he gets a bunch of DUIs and releases a dance remix to “Imagine” featuring Deadmau5
I encourage you to look closer.
You’d see that it’s the same scenes on these broken projectors.
It’s the same dusty textbooks in our history lectures.
Our megaphones are beginning to sound like broken records;
Useless chants by young pawns obsessed with being kings, but never taught chess or checkers,
But just how to be these necrophiliac Hannibal Lecters, raping the corpses of our dead predecessors,
Just to suck away a quote.
And we wonder why,
The eagles and the falcons rarely leave the treetops.
Once upon a time,
They came to teach us how to spread our wings for freedom,
And look,
We became a bunch of parrots and peacocks.
Now some may call me a lazy pessimist, and to be honest, I have to agree.
See I used to be that kid that waited for someone to move me, but all I heard were these clowns yappin’ about some backwards movement, blaring from my TV.
So all these Bob Marley and Bob Dylan covers and hacky sacks, it was easier to be a hypocrite.
We’re clever enough now that we can flip their shit to remind us that ignorance is still bliss.
Because at this point, we are educated enough to understand the dreams that Martin Luther King was dreaming,
But whether it’s gunshots, crack rocks or lack of imagination, kids these days are still hardly sleeping.
And when they are, it is some drug induced slumber,
And at that point, all they can see is color.
So how do they expect us to share this vision, if our idea of change is a scenic picture with a quote?
We were never taught compassion or sacrifice, but fucking right we know how to use mirrors and smoke.
We’ve recorded the lives of our past leaders, and mashed them all up into special features.
Made Bob Marley into some dude with dreads, smoking a spliff on a t-shirt.
Whether it’s Tupac, Ghandi, Shakespeare or Renaissance statues,
They just gave lines that our youth get tattooed.
We’re too busy playing suck and blow with their quotes and now we all got mono.
We all bought the fancy shades, and now we all think we’re Bono.
But really we’re just addicted.
To any artificial sense of enlightenment.
Forgetting,
That we are all just western kids, born with a sense of entitlement.
But see I understand,
That it’s not that simple.
That we were all born with the bark to spark inspiration,
But we’re human.
Sometimes we end up boarding up our windows.
And I am a hypocrite too.
I’ve been known to be that self-righteous dreamer, eager to get his fight on.
Leaving his apartment for a five-dollar organic coffee, while leaving his lights on.
I’ve pointed out someone who has littered, and criticized religion,
While praying for forgiveness for throwing my cigarette butts at pigeons.
I think we have the right intentions, but we’re getting a little restless.
We’re starting to forget that it was always more than Woodstock or Obama,
Change is called ‘change’ because it’s a long-term investment.
So if we’re going to do this, pardon the cliché, but let’s spread our wings, instead of being a flock of parrots retweeting.
And maybe in 100 years when they open their history text books, we too said words and lived stories worth quoting and reading.
“Too Many Narrators” by Patrick de Belen from Patrick de Belen on Vimeo.
