Take a Ride with Me

I am impacted by music in the same ways as literature. I feel it in the core of my soul, and it extends like a web.

Please stop in at the Good Samaritan Convention in Joysco and donate to the Literature Alive! exhibit; all proceeds will be donated to Virginia Tech's Memorial Fund.


In the song, Peaceful World, John Mellencamp writes these prophetic lines:

Source = LyricsFreak:

Hey yeah X 6

Come on baby take a ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be in a peaceful world

People know this world is a wreck
Were sick and tired of being politically correct
I see through it now but I didnt at first
The hipocrites made it worse and worse
Lookin down their noses at what people say
These are just words and words are okay
Its what you do and not what you say
If youre not part of the future then get out of the way

Come on baby take a ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be in a peaceful world

Hey yeah X 3

Racism lives in the u.s.a.
Get hip to what martin luther did have to say
I dont want my kids being brought up this way
Hatred to each other is not okay
Well Im not a preacher just a singer son
I can see more work to be done
Its what you do and not what you say
If youre not part of the future then get out of the way

Come on baby take a ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be in a peaceful world

Lay back the top and ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be
In a peaceful world

The moneys good and the works ok
Looks like everything is rolling our way
Til you gotta look the devil in the eye
You know that bastards one big lie
So be careful with your heart and what you love
Make sure that it was sent from above
Its what you do and not what you say
If youre not part of the future then get out of the way

Come on baby take a ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be in a peaceful world

Lay back the top and ride with me
Im up from indiana down to tennessee
Everything is cool as can be
In a peaceful world

Hey yeah X 5

I love this song. Now, I might be biased because I am a Cougar-Mellencamp fan, and I may be biased because I hear him sing this after the 911 attack on NYC. But, I hear it in the same tone as I read in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and both writers make me think about change.

Change begins with us. Emerson opened "Self Reliance" with a Latin phrase that I adore, "Ne te quaesiveris extra." English professors around the globe will champion the spirit of Emerson in the delivery of lines like "there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide..." and "society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members."

English faculty praise this spirit; they applaud his independence...well, until Emerson's followers show up at a faculty meeting in 2007.

We hear a mixed message...be creative...but not too too creative....engage students...but don't ask for any money to do it...

Second Life is a platform that is just emerging as an educational tool. But, so many of us are stuck in the molds from which we spring. It is hard to think outside the prim. But, perhaps we would all do well to follow Emerson's philosophy:

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.