The Good Fight

While on YouTube a few months back I encountered a beautiful song by activist-singer Evan Greer. I couldn't find lyrics, so I transcribed them myself.





Well, I've written many songs
about the things that have gone wrong
The wars, and the killings, and the lies
This world is full of hate and there is so much at stake
We must fight for our rights and for our lives
We've gotta raise a fist for our right to exist
in a world where freedom is a lie (alive?)
Strikes they will rage, black flags we'll wave
The rich will have fear in their eyes
But when the fight is done,
The revolution won,
We'll burn the final flag and walk on.

And if we close our eyes and hold each others' hands
And if we sing boldly in the night
We will watch the sun rise through the tears in our eyes
Knowing that we fought the good fight.

Behind our black bandanas
There's a love so strong  it can't be stayed
For every living thing in every song that we can sing
Each garden and each house that we have made
We know that in the end we can count upon our friends
To have a love stronger than the state
'Cause the tear gas makes us cry, the bullets make us die
But in the end, we will push beyond that gate --
Save the world and save the trees, set our comrades free
Rejoice though the coming was so late

And if we close our eyes and hold each others' hands
And if we sing out boldly in the night
We will watch the sun rise through the tears in our eyes
Knowing that we fought the good fight.

I met an old man outside an ice-cream stand
And in an old voice, he said to me
"You are young and you are strong, and you will find where you belong --
But remember that no man is your enemy.
It's the borders and the nations and the giant corporations,
But not a single living being."
So we struggle not for chaos, but for harmony
And we would rather fight instead of die
We struggle for the dawn, whose side are you on?
You'll know when we raise our voices high.

And if we close our eyes and hold each others' hands
And if we sing boldly in the night
We will watch the sun rise through the tears in our eyes
Knowing that we fought the good fight.

Freethought Friday #29

From Will Durant's The Age of Reason Begins, "The Summons to Reason", quoting Francis Bacon:

And as Descartes seventeen years later in the Discourse on Method, would propose to begin philosophy by doubting everything, so Bacon here demands an 'expurgation of the intellect' as the first step in the Renewal. 'Human knowledge as we have it is a mere medley and ill-digested mass, made up of much credulity and much accident, and also of the childish notions which are at first imbibed.' Therefore we must, at the start, clear our minds, so far as we can, of all preconceptions, prejudices, assumptions, and theories; we must turn away even from Plato and Aristotle; we must sweep out of our thought the 'idols', or time-honored illusions and fallacies, born of our personal idiosyncrasies of judgment or the traditional beliefs and dogmas of our group; we must banish all logical tricks of wishful thinking, all verbal absurdities of obscure thought. We must put behind us all those majestic deductive systems of philosophy, which proposed to draw a thousand eternal verities out of a few axioms and principles.  There is no magic hat in science; everything taken from the hat in works must first be put into it by observation by experiment. And not by mere casual observation, nor by "simple enumeration" of data", but by "experience....sought for, experiment."