There’s a sign on the wall. There’s always a wall. There’s always a sign on it. The rich erect the walls and the politicians plaster the signs all over them. Those signs are expensive, they cost a lot of money, there are new ones every day and we're all supposed to read them, but they're not telling us what we need to know.
The signs we need to pay attention to aren’t on those walls. They’re in the poisoned air all around us. They’re in that dying sky above us. They’re in the ravaged earth beneath our feet. Those signs are everywhere, posted by Nature and written in pain, warning of fracking and mountaintop mining, of ozone depletion and carbon emissions, of species extinction and polar cap melting, of the acid in the rain and the death of the oceans.
Catastrophic climate change is dismissed as a hoax on Fox News, it’s ignored by the corporate establishment, no meaningful action has been taken against it anywhere because the people who control the "governments" of this dying planet decide what gets attention and what doesn't, decide what's reported and what isn't, decide who is heard and who isn't.
Well catastrophic climate change has done some deciding too. It’s pounding on the doors of America, it’s pounding on the doors of Europe, it’s pounding on the doors of Asia, it’s standing on the doorstep of the world with more superstorms right behind it and the fire of karma in its eyes, it‘s come calling with a very loud final word or two for us before all the lights go out . . .
PLEASED TO MEET YOU. HOPE YOU GUESS MY NAME.
The politicians can’t say there hasn’t been enough time to stop the polluting and the poisoning and the drilling, those "public servants" have been given plenty of time to stop this savage corporate assault on the environment. The masters of corporate capitalism have been playing with fire, it's all those arsonists ever do, it's all they've ever done. We've seen their handiwork, we've seen the fires igniting, we've seen the rings of smoke drifting through the trees, but no one in power ever listens to progressives.
Or to songwriters.
In 1971, Robert Plant wrote a song about the threat of materialism, about saving the environment, about a stairway to heaven. He knew it can’t be bought with gold, it can’t be purchased with corporate cash, it can’t be acquired by the highest bidder and privatized for profit. It’s not for sale.
Dear lady, can you hear the wind blow? And did you know? Your stairway lies on the whispering wind.
Your stairway, our stairway, is still out there, waiting to be climbed. it can still be found, it can still be climbed, it can still lead us to reason.
That’s why it’s there.
It’s been more than forty years, but there’s still a tree by a brook, there’s still a songbird singing, there’s still a whisper of redemption in the wind, maybe there’s still time to change the road we’re on . . .