We also extend birthday greetings to three Facebook friends who celebrate their birthdays today. They are Desmond Christopher Mullins who lives in Carrick-on-Suir, Tipperary, Ireland: Mary O Regan who was born in the village where I was born, in Portlaw County Waterford, but who now lives in Dublin, Ireland, and Sonya Scott who lives in the village where I now live, Haworth, West Yorkshire. Enjoy your special day Desmond, Mary, and Sonya, and thank you for being my Facebook friend.
My song today is ‘Come Together’. This is a song by the English rock band the Beatles and was written by John Lennon, and credited to Lennon-McCartney. The song is the opening track on their 1969 album ‘Abbey Road’. The song reached the top of the charts in the United States and peaked at Number 4 in the United Kingdom.
‘John Lennon was initially inspired to write Come Together’ after a request from Timothy Leary. Leary wanted him to write a song for his campaign for Governor of California’ against Ronald Reagan. Leary’s campaign promptly ended when Leary was sent to prison for possession of marijuana. John Lennon recalled: “The thing was created in the studio. It's gobbledygook. ‘Come Together’ was an expression that Leary had come up with for his attempt at being president or whatever he wanted to be, and he asked me to write a campaign song. I tried and tried, but I couldn't come up with one. But I came up with this, ‘Come Together’, which would have been no good to him. You couldn't have a campaign song like that, right?”
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One of the most common phrases designed to appeal to unification factors in any community, country, or organisation is the plea to ‘Come Together’. We have recently witnessed such political pleas over Brexit, and more recently, over the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and the restrictions that the country has faced since March 2020. However much our politicians perennially make pleas for the electorate to ‘Come Together’ on this or that, when push comes to shove, our governing bodies always have vested interests to protect.
Whatever their political colours or your political persuasions happen to be, democracy works more effectively in a free society when one's opposition is open instead of being a combination of mutually interested parties pursuing their own covert ends. Democracy can only work when it is transparent to all, and it is seen to exist in even distribution and access. Democracy carries with it the right to peacefully protest in public and to be able to appropriately express one’s honest view without fear or favour. Democracy demands the individual’s right to discriminate between what one believes to be right and wrong morally. Democracy demands the right of the individual to become a collective body, and for a collective body to accommodate individual and minority views/ interests within it.
When humans come together, the world can advance at an unbelievable pace. Take the little time that the scientists from many nations took to come up with several viable vaccines to contain the Covid-19 virus (less than one year) when previously, a new vaccine would have taken up to ten years to produce. Yet, instead of the whole world ‘staying together’ and building upon the power of co-operation instead of national competition so that we can eradicate this disease and all its variants globally as soon as possible, we already see national factions in European countries moving farther apart from Great Britain once more. What for, one might ask? For nothing more than saving face within their own communities! Even the political vanity of power-crazed European politicians facing an election soon is prepared to save face before saving real lives!
Shall we ever learn that we can achieve more together in a common purpose than will ever be possible in the national division?
Love and peace
Bill xxx