Imagine

I was listening to the John Lennon song “Imagine” today and it made more sense to me than it ever had before. There is just so much strife, hatred, and belligerent war-mongering out there today. Putin’s savage war against Ukraine is a glaring example of how we need to rethink ways to solve our problems.

John Lennon of the Beatles was a brilliantly talented songwriter. He and Paul McCartney composed hundreds of songs and albums that made the Beatles the most popular, best-selling artists of all time in America.

But after the Beatles broke up, John Lennon continued writing songs that reflected his growing belief that war was wrong and that we should just “Give Peace a Chance.”

Lennon was still a productive artist with his own band and was in the midst of his post-Beatles career when he was shot and killed by a deranged fan outside his New York home in 1980. He was only 40 years old.

The lyrics of “Imagine” are revolutionary and startling at first glance. He sings of a new, different world where there’s no heaven or hell, and people just living for today. He even posits that if there were no countries or borders, there would be nothing to kill or die for. Imagine.

No waving of flags by self-serving politicians for nationalistic advantage, no appeals to the base for more power, more influence, no greed or land grabs or territorial objectives. No more power politics and factional hate-filled divisions like in America today. Imagine.

Lennon dreamed of a world where people could just live their lives in peace. No more war widows, young men, and women killed in the prime of their youth. No more innocent civilians killed in massive indiscriminate mass artillery bombings or airstrikes as they just tried to live their lives. Imagine.

He put his life on the line to advance his radical theories. Or were they so radical after all? Isn’t that what most of us really want anyway? To just live out our lives in peace, to enjoy the fruits of our labor, to raise our children in a world where they can be safe and happy? Imagine.

What would it be like to live in a world where people would be encouraged and rewarded for their creativity, where their talents would be nourished and their minds set free to roam at solving real problems. Problems like world hunger or deadly diseases like cancer could be eradicated. Imagine.

How would it feel to be able to clean up the environment by striking down self-serving entities like the oil industry, the coal industry, and the fossil fuel industry? To stop producing toxic waste that not only pollutes the very air we breathe but also the water we drink. Imagine.

What if we stopped chopping down all the trees in the Amazon rainforest, the lungs of our planet? To stop dumping toxic wastes into the ocean as if it was unimportant not only to the creatures of the sea, like fish and marine mammals like dolphins and whales but also a very clear and present danger to the delicate ecosystem that defines our planet Earth. Imagine.

Can it really be that hard, considering the stakes of global suicide our policies are now so selfishly striving to achieve by their current self-interests? To do our utmost to preserve life on this planet we all share in every country on the globe simply by cleaning things up. Imagine.

What kind of a world would it be compared to the self-destructive, belligerent self-serving politics of nationalism, the greed of the industrialists, or the holier than thou extreme evangelists that are running, and ruining so many lives today? Could it possibly be any worse? Imagine.

Go ahead, think about it for yourselves.

Imagine...