nataldaylia

Happy Birthday
...to brithistorian — may this year bring satisfaction, happiness, peace and joy to you.

nataldaylia

Happy Birthday
...to brithistorian — may this year bring satisfaction, happiness, peace and joy to you.

Blog Action Day (Day Late and Dollar Short Mix)

Mercy, Mercy
Ah, mercy mercy me.
     When Marvin Gaye sat down almost 40 years ago to write his report on the health of the planet - both elegiac and urgent, its surprisingly brief lyrics direct, beautiful, filled with bewilderment and sorrow - he didn't speak of global warming. He talked about oceans dirtied with oil, fish poisoned with mercury, the killing of wildlife with radiation. Those were the concerns of the public as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
     When you consider that the copyright on his song is only 1971, though, his words seem to reflect an almost prescient, and very clear-eyed, awareness.
No, no ...
     I was 16 at the time the song came out. I remember being interested in music, but if I heard the song at that time, it didn't register. Even though my nascent political awakening had already started along with my interest in rock and roll, ecologically-minded Motown wasn't all that big on the one AM radio station to which I had access. Ecology - that wasn't a word that interested me, not like politics. They really didn't have much to do with each other, did they?
Where did all the blue skies go?
     Eventually, though, I noticed.
Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east,
Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury.
     I left high school, left college, got a job. It was the mid-1970s, then the late 1970s. I still heard the song around the dial, and now the words resonated a little more. Exxon Valdez. China Syndrome. (Look them up, children. Disasters - attacks on the earth both real and imagined, that captured our attention long before you were born.)
Radiation under ground and in the sky,
Animals and birds who live nearby are dying.
     Somehow the years went by. I heard the song again, and again. I heard the compound word Greenpeace for the first time. The concerns changed, but they were still the same. Earth was hurting, Earth's children were hurting. We were hurting.
Ah, mercy, mercy me
     Back then, we didn't seem to want to realize that we were also doing the hurting. Or when we did realize it, we turned on each other, snarling about who or what was to blame. It was the industrialists, it was the capitalists, it was our parents, it was the whalers, it was the polluters, it was Them. Not us.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
    Except that they are. Almost. We're still hissing and spitting at each other about who's to blame. (Except for those increasingly few among us who still claim that nothing's wrong. Or not much. Not too much. Well, not too awfully much.) We're still trying hard not to look in the mirror.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
     Concerns change. .
Ah, mercy, mercy, me
     Global Warming.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
     But sometimes things do change. Sometimes they change because we humans do - reluctantly, and only when our noses are not only pushed into our own mistakes but bloodied by them. 
Ah, mercy, mercy me.
     Sometimes we change when the threats to the planet finally come to us, like some knife to our throat, and we can't argue it away, we can't bargain it away, we can't pretend it's not there.
Ah, things ain't what they used to be.
     When the droughts can't be ignored. When the famines don't go away. When the temperatures and the great oceans rise and the little landlocked seas shrink along with the icecaps.
What about this overcrowded land,
How much more abuse from man can she stand?
     When the fires of factories and cook stoves, the exhaust of cars (and cows, we can't avoid mentioning the cows, because who says crisis can't be a little funnier with cows) cast up an insulating veil of particulates between us and the sky, and we can't pretend we don't know the inconvenient truths of what the veil causes.
Things ain't what they used to be.
     Because we know more now. (Like, did you know - and I got this from Robert H. Socolow, writing in the July, 2005, Scientific American - that 380 of every million molecules we draw into our body with each breath are carbon dioxide, compared with the 280 molecules of CO2 Shakespeare breathed in?)
Ah, mercy, mercy me.
     Marvin Gaye's song clocks in at about three minutes, 25 seconds. At about 2:46, the music takes an eerie turn, falling abruptly into a minor key, its melody suddenly the echoing wail of something ... not quite right, something dying. I finally noticed that ending. And once I noticed it, I couldn't get it out of my head.
Things ain't what they used to be.
     How close are we to the end of the song?
Oh, na na...
My sweet Lord... No
My Lord... My sweet Lord
     See, if I'd wanted to end on a dramatic note, I wouldn't have added those last three lines. They're the ones you can't really hear him sing, but they're there in most of the printed lyrics to the song (which actually bears the rather cumbersome title "Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)")
     They're both rejection and prayer. Perhaps a rejection of the vision he's woven, perhaps a prayer that it won't come true.
Things ain't what they used to be.
     They don't have to be. We can change, can't we?


Mercy, Mercy Me (The Ecology)
© Jobete Music Co Inc,