THE WORLD IS UGLY(AND THE PEOPLE ARE SAD)

Oh, the world is ugly and the people are sad,
And you know that ain’t no fun.
But, Baby, don’t you start feelin’ bad.
Don’t you run out and buy you a gun.
Don’t you start shootin’ smack or poppin’ speed
Or smokin’ too much weed.

Refrain:
One thing you never learned from your mom and dad --
Now, don’t take it too hard or it’ll drive you mad --
But the world is ugly and the people are sad --
Yes, the world is ugly and the people are sad.

The news is spreadin’ like a weed
That the world is ugly and the people are sad.
I wonder where it all will lead,
Before our story is done.
I think of my unborn daughter and son
And all that I never had.
(...repeat refrain...)

If all the rocks began to bleed,
Would it make the people glad?
Or if we all outlived the sun,
Would we ever know what we need?
No. No. No. The world is ugly and the people are sad
And the fun has just begun.
(...repeat refrain...)

What if our lives had never begun?
Then, who would plant the seed
Of a world so ugly and a people so sad,
From the Bronx to Leningrad?
Who would there be to start to breed
These sufferers under the sun?
(...repeat refrain...)

So here we stand beneath the sun,
Trying to buy some fun --
As the dirty hooves of Life’s stampede
Pound in us to succeed.
And we each live our Odyssey and our Iliad,
In a world that’s ugly with people that are sad.
(...repeat refrain...)


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1978

PEASANT (WIK DEFINITION)

Peasant


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In a detail of Brueghel's Land of Cockaigne (1567) a soft-boiled egg has little feet to rush to the luxuriating peasant who catches drops of honey on his tongue, while roast pigs roam wild: in fact, hunger and harsh winters were realities for the average European in the 16th century.
A peasant, derived from 15th century French païsant meaning one from the pays, the countryside or region, which itself derives from the Latin pagus, country district, is an agricultural worker with roots in the countryside in which he or she dwells, either working for others or, more specifically, owning or renting and working by his or her own labour a small plot of ground. The term peasant today is sometimes used in a pejorative sense for impoverished farmers.
Peasants typically make up the majority of the agricultural labour force in a Pre-industrial society, depending on the cultivation of their land: without stockpiles of provisions they thrive or starve according to the most recent harvest. Pre-industrial societies have diminished with the advent of globalization and as such there are considerably fewer peasants to be found in rural areas throughout the world. However, there are still peasant populations in Mexico, Central America, South America, Africa, India, China, Europe and various parts of Southeast Asia.

[edit] See also

"Peasants in a Tavern" by Adriaen van Ostade (c. 1635), at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Feudalism
Folk culture
Lower class
Peasant revolt
Popular revolt in late medieval Europe
Slavery

[edit] Other terms for peasant
Aloer
Campesino
Churl
Cotter
Felaheen
Free tenant
Honbyakushō
Kulak
Muzhik
Pagesos de remença
Peon
Proletarian
Serf
Villein
Smerd

[edit] Notes and references
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant"
Categories: Articles lacking sources from June 2007 All articles lacking sources Early Middle Ages High Middle Ages Farming history Feudalism Industrial Revolution Social history
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History

FROM RACHAEL CARSON, 1956

A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.
If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder without any such gift from the fairies, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in. Parents often have a sense of inadequacy when confronted on the one hand with the eager, sensitive mind of a child and on the other with a world of complex physical nature, inhabited by a life so various and unfamiliar that it seems hopeless to reduce it to order and knowledge. In a mood of self-defeat, they exclaim, “How can I possibly teach my child about nature -- why, I don't even know one bird from another!”
I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow. The years of early childhood are the time to prepare the soil. Once the emotions have been aroused -- a sense of the beautiful, the excitement of the new and the unknown, a feeling of sympathy, pity, admiration or love -- then we wish for knowledge about the object of our emotional response. Once found, it has lasting meaning. It is more important to pave the way for the child to want to know than to put him on a diet of facts he is not ready to assimilate.
From The Sense of Wonder, by Rachel L. Carson, copyright 1956.

UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED


1.
You don’t know your steering wheel from your transmission.
You don’t know your tailpipe from your ignition.
Yet you think you can control the spark
In me with which I disembark
From you with all your booby prizes,
Plastic trash in bright disguises.
You’re fooled into thinking that you’re so patrician,
But you’re miles from home and it’s getting dark.
If you could see how Nature individualizes,
Then maybe you could tell a lamb from a shark.

2.
It’s too late to shop for an antidote;
You’re married to your mother, that unholy cutthroat.
Your nightmares are merely her nocturnal emission.
The only phase left is your decomposition.
You vote for a con man who talks like Candide:
It’s no mystery why you never succeed.
By mere accident, you stay afloat,
Puffed with panic and inhibition.
I’ve often wondered where you learned to misread
The obvious facts of the human condition.

3.
You don’t know a vulture from a skylark.
You’re makin’ me feel just like the Prince of Denmark,
When I watch you whore after church and flag,
Then turn to me and start to nag
That it’s my fault whenever the price of bread rises,
Yet it’s your own face that your mirror despises.
When you were a girl, did you like to park -
To court and spark and maybe snag
A boy in that mouth which evangelizes
Now about lies scribbled on an old rag?

4.
You follow wherever the bad shepherds lead,
Then wonder why your pockets bleed.
A TV preacher hypnotizes
You into thinking one god fits all sizes.
I invite you, instead, to study a dust mote,
Then rethink to what god your time you devote.
Superstition is unsafe at any speed.
Spastic-but-surely, it pulverizes
Any innocent soul it can use for a scapegoat.
Yet it’s the stale script that your blood memorizes.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1986

HERETIC (definitions and such)

heretic
Dictionary

her·e·tic (hĕr'ĭ-tĭk) n.
A person who holds controversial opinions, especially one who publicly dissents from the officially accepted dogma of the Roman Catholic Church.adj.
Heretical.
[Middle English heretik, from Old French heretique, from Late Latin haereticus, from Greek hairetikos, able to choose, factious, from hairetos, chosen, from haireisthai, to choose. See heresy.]
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Thesaurus
Heretic DefinitionLook Up Heretic Now It's Easy w/Free Reference Toolbar Reference.Starware.com
Home > Library > Words > Thesaurus
heretic
noun
A person who dissents from the doctrine of an established church: dissenter, dissident, nonconformist, schismatic, sectarian, sectary, separationist, separatist. See religion.
Word Tutor

Home > Library > Words > Spelling & Usage
heretic IN BRIEF: One who holds opinions contrary to the recognized standards or tenets of any philosophy. I felt like a heretic because I did not agree with the opinions of the rest of the people at the party.
Wikipedia

Home > Library > Reference > Wikipedia
heretic (disambiguation)
A heretic is a person who expresses or acts on opinions considered to be heresy.
Heretic may also refer to:
Heretic (computer game) (1994)

See also
Heresy (disambiguation)
"Homer the Heretic", an episode of the animated TV show The Simpson

MR. DRACULA


Mr. Dracula runs this town with fang and fist.
He bleeds us dry and lays our dreams to waste.
When choosing his victims, he tends to be democratic:
He doesn’t suck only on those who sleep in an attic,
The idiotic or the otherwise pathetic.
Mr. Dracula drained my father down to his last
Drop, then came to turn my flesh to paste.
But I alone have escaped through this dreary mist,
Your screaming Cassandra, bleeding my prophetic
Warning to you, which I can’t make too emphatic.

Mr. Dracula’s thirst won’t be quenched until he’s kissed
Every girl and boy in this town and made a feast
Of their dreams and their blood, in his melodramatic,
Satanic lust for empire. And any critic
Who stands in his way can expect no sympathetic
Ear, for all have had their blood replaced
With his poison. Mr. Dracula has passed
His lies on to his victims as though he’d pissed
In their veins and brains and made them idiotic
With Draculaism --each victim his fanatic.

His fangs are more sharper than those of that
serpent who hissed
Its way and will through Eden and taught us to taste
The knowledge of our disease whose only tonic
Is either death or else daring to become analytic.
In his cape, he might be mistaken for a peripatetic,
But underneath, lies the heart of a fiend beating fast
Toward undermining our dreams, slicker
than can be guessed.
For Mr. Dracula’s thirst has caused him to twist
Even our tongues and brains from their empathetic
Health into cancerous meat, sad, manic.


Mr. Dracula’s our father, our mother, our Zeitgeist,
Our demon lover, sucking us into a tryst,
Sure to drive us each batty and to make thick
Our sacred blood — yours, mine — and to hasten black
Poverty, failure, loss, this burning lake,
This hell, this jam-packed planet, this heist,
This town with its mill for which we are the grist.
And don’t let’s leave out our children, whose blissed
Innocence ends in bleak damnations which leak
Their blood and their dreams into his fangs, sad, sick.

Mr. Dracula runs this town and he keeps a list
Of naughty boys and girls who’d become their own Christ.
So, take my advice and avoid any lunatic
Who tells you otherwise. The mentally weak
Are bound to go on ignoring my little critique.
But you... you whose wisdom has not been erased
By Mr. Dracula’s fangs, you can outwit that beast,
If only you’ll let my words take you by the wrist
To subvert his evil will. Wear this garlic. Don’t panic.
And let the stake you drive at your crossroads be politic.


Words and Music by Galen Green c 1989