“THESE ARE YOUR RIGHTS!” — a PSA for the coming election from The DOVES.
If this song sounds like it was written by someone in their 20s — it was. Yours truly. And never played by or for anyone else (I don’t think — other than Trena). Was messing around with it a while back, and it began to resonate. “Do I have to obey these things…?”
“The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”
…
“The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.”
— C. S. Lewis
