I know I’m just an old man reliving my youth when I’m listening to my old music but it’s the only thing that keeps me sane in a crazy world.

To be sure, my music kept me sane in the crazy world of my youth, but I had such hope for the future. I blame Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, as well as Ray Bradbury, for that. Even though these authors, and most of my favorites, including George Orwell, predicted a future to fear, it was more in the way of a warning rather than a sure thing.

Clarke’s HAL taught us the dangers of AI even as the Laws of Robotics were drawn up by Asimov. But it was the music that inspired action and involvement of the consumers of Acid Rock, as it was often called. To be sure, Acid Rock inspired deep thinking, and while many used substances of various types and illegality, it was still the music that provided surreal guitar riffs and prosaic lyrics that led to profound thought.

By the way, you didn’t need the substances to hear the music or understand the meaning of the words,

Eve of Destruction, Blowing In The Wind, Masters Of War, A Hard Rains A Gonna Fall, It Ain’t Me Babe, Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Immigration Man, Ohio, All You Need Is Love, America, and these are but a few of the songs that I grew up and wise to.

I purposely left out the artists who either wrote or sang these songs, hoping you would be curious to look them up on YouTube or Spotify.

The point is, we are living in a dangerous, hateful world, and we are in danger of giving up on democracy while ignoring the culprits of its destruction. Sadly, these American Oligarchs are not our enemies, but they have engineered it so that we are the enemies of each other.

How did that happen so quickly?

Dehumanizing the other, the foreigner, the different, the northerner, the southerner became much easier to do than trying to understand them or to recognize the commonalities we all share.

Fear has replaced care, and God has been killed once again, all the while his persecutors proclaim their faith and allegiance.

We don’t have to wait for AI to destroy us.

We’ve shown we are quite capable of doing that without even turning on a computer.