In a big country...

I just finished listening to this solid example of Eighties Scot's Rock, or whatever that particular genre was called. We just called it New Wave.

The chorus of the song goes like this:

And in a big country, dreams stay with you,
Like a lover's voice, fires the mountainside..
Stay alive..

(I thought that pain and truth were things that really mattered
But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered)

I'm not expecting to grow flowers in the desert,
But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime..

In my youth I never paid much attention to lyrics - I was an American Bandstand kind of kid - if it had a good beat, and you could dance to it, that was enough for me. Heck, a lot of the songs I listed to, you couldn't tell what they were singing anyway.

But for some reason, I thought about this song today and then it came on the Internet Radio at work. I'm not shilling for them so I won't tell you which one. But they do have a nice New Wave station or two.

In a big country, dreams stay with you...

America is the big country. Not the biggest country, but the big one - the one everyone seems to want to get to; even today. When I was what is referred to as an expatriated American, we had a saying, 'The States are a great place to be from.' That was merely a chic statement at the time but true nevertheless. Even in Beirut, all the folks I ran into were not unhappy that I was American. They thought it was cool.

 They didn't have MTV in the old days...

But you can't stay here with every single hope you had shattered...

How often, especially during the King Bush the Second years, did you hear some flaming liberal from Hollywood spout off about moving to France? About as often as one of those tightwad conservatives replied, "Need any help packing?"

If America, the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, now has a busy exit door, is there another Big Country? Environmental disasters; natural disasters; military disasters; political disasters; social disasters. Sounds like the sixties...almost.

But I can live and breathe and see the sun in wintertime...

I don't think the majority of American people want much - despite the calls for Obama's head when he bailed out Wall Street and Detroit and left us holding the bag. It's telling that many of the rabble-rousers had voted for him just months previous. No. It would've been nice to give the billions to the people - how about $50K per family? Wouldn't that have stimulated the economy? Oh, I forgot...if the banks aren't loaning money, that's bad. So if we didn't need the loan...

We just want to live and breath and see the sun in the wintertime. Icelandic ash notwithstanding.

We live in a big country where dreams can still stay with you. Dreams that don't come from Washington.

What say you?

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