I come from a part of the city where the title "Lord" usually doesn't refer to a so-called genteel master (How many slumlords can be considered genteel anyway?). Although the title carries some weight and respect inside the churches and out in the streets of Chicago's West Side, they very much mean very different things.
It is with this definition that the image that just popped into my head upon thinking of this lyric was both active and hilarious. Ten Vice Lords or Spanish Lords jumping out of their skulls. There are things that scare even the most hardened criminals.
But that's also a bit frightening. I hear, in the thick of the beginning of winter, tale after tale of brutal violence committed within my wonderful city. A girl gang raped outside a local rock theatre blocks from my house. A string of robberies right off the train stop of my temp location. An off-duty cop shot dead outside the store he was working at over a few dollars - just a mile and a half straight north of there.
A half dozen cops mercilessly beating a robber suspect (and the city trying to keep it quiet). This is the world we live in, to quote Genesis. And i don't want this world for my daughter.
Yet the Lords, the gang-rapers, the muggers, the cops are but symptoms of the problem. Our world is soaked in violence because we allow it to be. Because we can't imagine a cooperative world - and when we try we're called foolish. Violence has made itself our Lord.
Are we merely its subjects?
It is with this definition that the image that just popped into my head upon thinking of this lyric was both active and hilarious. Ten Vice Lords or Spanish Lords jumping out of their skulls. There are things that scare even the most hardened criminals.
But that's also a bit frightening. I hear, in the thick of the beginning of winter, tale after tale of brutal violence committed within my wonderful city. A girl gang raped outside a local rock theatre blocks from my house. A string of robberies right off the train stop of my temp location. An off-duty cop shot dead outside the store he was working at over a few dollars - just a mile and a half straight north of there.
A half dozen cops mercilessly beating a robber suspect (and the city trying to keep it quiet). This is the world we live in, to quote Genesis. And i don't want this world for my daughter.
Yet the Lords, the gang-rapers, the muggers, the cops are but symptoms of the problem. Our world is soaked in violence because we allow it to be. Because we can't imagine a cooperative world - and when we try we're called foolish. Violence has made itself our Lord.
Are we merely its subjects?
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