![We Didn’t Start The Fire [It was always burning]](https://myrise.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/We-Didnt-Start-The-Fire-It-was-always-burning.jpg)
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You know the song?
By Billy Joel.
Here’s a YouTube link in case you’d like to have a listen –> www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
It’s different, isn’t it?
Both to Joel’s other songs and, well, most songs.
He wrote it in 1989.
In response to a conversation with a young Julian Lennon and a friend.
They’d told him how hard they felt it was turning 21 in the late 80s and how he’d have had it easier growing up in the 50s and 60s.
According to Wikipedia, the conversation went:
“It’s a terrible time to be 21!”
Joel replied to him “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.”
The friend replied, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”.
Joel retorted, “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?”
The song is, essentially, a mini history lesson, covering the year Billy Joel was born up to the (then) present day.
117 important people, situations, conflicts and historical events.
With the intention of showing that the world has always been full of problems, chaos and challenges.
“We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning, since the worlds been turning”
Something that’s worth remembering now, as much as at any point in history.
If you read many people’s social media, the world has never been worse.
“Stop the world, I want to get off” (worth noting as the title of a play from 1961).
“World’s gone mad”.
“Gone to the dogs”.
Every generation telling the next that things were better “in my day”.
Sure, there are specific challenges at the moment.
But there have always been specific challenges.
There’s never not been.
It doesn’t mean we dismiss the current challenges, of course.
But we can put them in context.
Realise that the “fire” will always be “burning”.
It’s how we respond to it that’s key.
We can either live our life in the way we want to, in line with our values – despite what’s going on in the world.
Or we can let those fires derail us.
Much love,
Jon ‘Piano Man’ Hall
P.S. Over the remainder of this week I’m going to try and cover some parallels from the events mentioned in this song.
Hopefully it will be a 7 day song. Might be 5. Could be 2. I’ve only got one in mind and the point of writing this. Stick with me 🙂
