All around me I see the answers
Dancin’ all alone
What if they came together
To push each other on?
From “Ecotopia (One Place in the World)“
by Lloyd Ferris ft. James Williams and Toni Briant
I am a songwriter-drummer who came of age in the late 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA. Like many musicians of my generation, I started out dreaming I could make the world a better place with my songs. The world hasn’t become a better place — yet — but the dream is still going strong. And it will never go away.
When I was 21, I quit the music business forever for the first time, and set out to study what causes war, what causes poverty, and what can be done about them. War, because the atomic bomb worried me. Poverty, because my mother came close to starving to death during the Great Depression of the 1930s. I soon discovered that the environment, and racial issues, could not be ignored if the first two problems are to be solved.
I made a promise to myself to be skeptical of all pat answers, left or right, secular or spiritual. Now, at 72, I am putting together a website of songs about some interesting answers, and the many still unanswered questions, that I have stumbled across in my journey.
Many of the solutions are ones you may have heard of before. Some might surprise you. Some are about mistakes — how not to do things. Some are about successes, ones that lay a foundation so that more may come. We never know what tiny success may lay the final cornerstone to bring it all together. It may be what YOU are working on!
In the final analyses, the big challenge of the 21st century may be in how we get all these answers that are dancing around us to dance together — without resorting to authoritarian rule to make it happen. And without giving in to authoritarian rule when it subtly, or with a sledgehammer, tries to interfere.
I invite you to take a listen, and then judge for yourself what you think ought to be done: