We never were told what to expect at the end of our Mesopotamian war, all we ever got were vague goals and delivered in shifty simplified rhetoric. The Stars Aren't Falling is made up mostly of questions that haven't been answered or addressed in these ten long years. Questions about faith, fire power, family, and fear.
My son was on his way when I started writing the song, and I got to thinking about the sequence of wars in the last three generations, and how exponentially detached some of us have become from the battlefield. From my grandfather on a Navy destroyer at Normandy to my dad doing whatever he could to stay the hell away from Vietnam, to me watching embedded mouthpieces on TV, hoping my few friends that volunteered to go come back unharmed and dreading the inevitable news of innocent casualties.
I have not been on the battlefield and have not been threatened by the fear and violence that war zone civilians and military families face. I wrote this song from my own filtered perspective as a baffled witness as well as the perspective, as I imagine it, of a confused child comforted by his mother.
No comments:
Post a Comment