Saudade

Whiskey Lullaby Lyrics
 

        Suadade is a Portuguese word meaning the longing for something or someone that you know may never come back.  "She broke his heart, he spent his whole life trying to forget." Saudade is expressed here because the man had his heart broken, and he knows it a possibility that the woman that he loves may never come back to him, but he remains hopeful through all the pain he has gone through.  In English we don't really have a word that means the same thing as saudade, the closest we can really get is nostalgia.  we experience saudade in many ways, when we miss our hometown, even though we all swore we would get out.   As Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz said; "There's no place like home." Although small towns may have their turn-offs, like small minded people and rumors, we will always miss something that we love, even when we find something we love more.

My Mary Go Round

               

 

               Mary Go Round Lyrics

                The song Mary Go Round is by Katie musgraves is a song that exposes the wrongness in southern traditions.  "If you ain't got two kids by 21, You're probably gonna die alone, At least that's what tradition told you." Young people in the South, girls especially are expected to grow up as fast as they can and begin a life without ever having a chance to question what they've been taught and what they've seen in their lives.  We tend to just accept the traditions, like getting married very young, without even thinking about it, because it's all we really know, we saw it without parents, and our grandparents before them. 

                "It don't matter if you don't believe, Come Sunday morning you best be there, In the front row, like you're s'posed to."  Another particularly southern tradition that we are supposed to embrace without hesitation is to be a devoted Christian.  However, the sincerity of going to church making a person a good Christian can be offset, because in a small town like ours, we know that other churchgoers can do things that aren't exactly Godlike.  A man can be out drunk and cheating on his wife Friday night, and everyone will be whispering about it as he is helping gather offering in church Sunday morning.  in this way, going to church becomes something that we simply do, and it might lose faith in the meaning of being a christian.

Forgiveness

                Can forgiveness be easily given to someone who does terrible things to many people?  Such as a warlord kidnapping children and forcing them to be sex slaves for over 20 years? I don’t think so. 

                This person had been committing this crime for over 20 years.  He had plenty of time to stop and get forgiveness.  Reasonably, someone can assume that this amount of time was all of his adult life, and someone cannot easily change something they have been doing that long.  Logically, even if this person were given forgiveness, he would not change. 

                Also, this man was taking the lives of children.  This would mentally scar them, turning them into monsters because of what they were put through.  This would also deprive them of a normal future with a family.  What if one of these children could have made a cure for cancer? Or AIDS? In this way, the man is also depriving the world of potentially vital minds because they would never reach their true potential as human beings. 

                Thousands of children could have been effected by this one man, and no one has the right to negatively affect the outcome of one person’s life, let alone thousands. 

young? or just stupid?

            We are young, but does that mean we have to make stupid decisions?  In the song by snoop Dog, Wiz Khalifa, and Bruno Mars, they say that they live “young, and wild and free.” But is this really the best way for teenagers to feel?  As a teenager, there is a lot of pressure for us to do things that are not the best things for our futures, and can get us into a lot of unnecessary trouble.  In fact, we are not given much freedom from our parents, not only because they think that we will make bad decisions ourselves, but it is expected at our age.

            “The worst mistake is to not make any.” I have heard this saying a lot since I became a teenager, but I wonder if there is any truth behind it.  Can it really be a mistake to follow the many rules and regulations given to us from teachers, parents, and other forms of authority? All of these rules are put into place by people who have lived through the teenage years, and if they don’t want us to make mistakes, then it can’t also be a mistake to strive to be perfect.  While I know it is impossible to be perfect, isn’t it what we all secretly try to be? So, what makes us think about rebelling during this point in our lives?  

Seceret Battles

song lyrics

The song Concrete Angel was recorded by Martina McBride in 2003.  It is a very touching song about the abuse of a young girl. “The teacher wonders but she doesn't ask, it’s hard to see the pain behind the mask.” When we suspect that someone in our lives is being abused by someone close to them, it can be hard to ask them about it, and it can be even harder for them to admit it, so sometimes you may have to go on your own instincts.  Sometimes with these things it can be very hard to tell if the person you are focusing on is suffering, because they have usually been raised to hide all evidence of their abuse.  “Wearing the same dress she wore yesterday, she hides the bruises with the linen and lace.”  This goes back to the children suffering from child abuse thinking that they must hide all the evidence.  Some children even think that the abuse is their fault, and the people that are abusing them usually threaten them into thinking that the abuse will only get worse if they reach out for help.  “Sometimes she wishes she was never born.”  In these situations the children are more prone to suicide and are more prone to become child abusers themselves.  The psychological damage outlives the bruises, and will usually stay with the children until adulthood.  “A statue stands in a shaded place, an angel girl with an upturned face, a name is written on a polished rock.” The people of a community will always mourn the loss of a young person, even if they were not necessarily important to the community itself.  It is especially upsetting to a community when they feel as though the situation could have been easily avoided by someone simply investigating a suspicion, as it is in this song.  The shock of a young person passing away can rock a small community to its core, and with child abuse effecting more than 3.3 million children, this is a problem that should be investigated further in any suspected cases.  People may begin to over-investigate child abuse, but if it even saves one life, it will be very worth it.

21 Guns Salute

            The song “Just a Dream” by Carrie Underwood is a very touching song about young love, the loss of a husband that was in the military.  “It was two weeks after she turned 18, all dressed in white.” This is referencing a girl getting married very young.  In the south, it is an unspoken tradition for a woman to be married at a young age, and to have children soon after.  We are expected to fall in love in high school, and the logical step after that, even though most of us are still children at this point, is to get married and begin a life with our “high school sweetheart.”  “She put her veil down, trying to hide the tears, oh she just couldn't believe it” I can remember when my mother told me that my uncle had passed away.  She watched my face, and started to cry. Seeing this, I tried to fight my own tears and make her feel better any way I could.  I believe this is what the girl in the song is trying to do; she’s trying to make the people who care about her and her deceased husband think everything is okay.   “Everybody's saying, he's, not coming home now, this can't be happening to me” here, she is saying that she can’t really accept that she will never see that person again. When I was 13, I lost a cousin overseas that was very close to me.  Even though I wasn’t really a naïve child anymore, I couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t real, that he would be home for Christmas and would sit next to me around the dinner table like he always did.  “And then the guns rang one last shot, and it felt like a bullet in her heart” at my cousins funeral, they did a 21 gun salute where they fired shots to honor the time he had served as a Maurine.  I can remember my uncle leaning down and whispering that it was going to be very loud soon, and that I shouldn’t be scared.  The shots echoed and that was when I finally realized that he wasn’t going to come back, so I can relate to the feeling that the bullet was hitting me.  Sometimes, we lose people that we care about very much, and we can go through stages of numbness, and denial.  However, when we see how upset this can make the people around us we realize that we do have to move on and the idea that they passed away while defending the people that they love makes it a little bit easier to accept the idea.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/carrieunderwood/justadream.html (the song lyrics by Carrie Underwood)

current connection 1/21/13

thought you might want to see the actual video

“My life was horrible, but I didn’t realize it until many years later.” Can you imagine having a terrible life, and not even knowing it? Katie Beers lived that life until she was 10.  “I was abused by my mother, godmother, and her husband.”  These were just everyday things to her.  While I, myself have never been abused by anyone close to me, I have had friends that have gone through emotional and physical abuse from parents and even in their relationships.  The psychological damage is pretty clear to everyone, especially if, like me, you gravitate to people in need.  “The abuse by my family gave me the strength to withstand.” I can also vouch for the fact that people who have been through these situations are some of the strongest people I have ever met, because they don’t have another choice.  They are forced to be survivors, and this is the best way to become one, though the emotional turmoil often makes these people hard to reach.  The will to survive, like in Katie Beers, is easy enough to see, but the source of this strength is often from darker past then imaginable.  

Not only was Katie Beers abused as a child, but she also was abducted. She was held in a “dungeon” built specifically for her by a man that she knew.  This reminds me of the movie “The Lovely Bones.” Is which, a man builds an underground playhouse so he could lure a young girl into it alone; he then sexually abused and killed her. I remember thinking that no real girl would be stupid enough not to sense the danger that was practically oozing from the man on the screens pores.  It then occurred to me that the “bad guy” isn’t always obvious.  In fact, he usually looks harmless.  In this story, the man that abducted Katie Beers tried to lure her into his dungeon with toys and things, and this is also a lot like what happened in The Lovely Bones.  I can understand how a child can be lured by little things like this, especially one that doesn’t receive love from their family.  I have seen this in children also. Like, if a child doesn’t get sweets often, it is pretty easy to get them to do what you want using a candy bar.  So, the “Bad Guy” in stories may be easy to pick out, but in real life they are suave and manipulative enough to disguise themselves.