Can you believe it has been 35 years since John Lennon was murdered? It just doesn’t seem possible that so many years have passed since the music world lost one of its most influential artists and many of us lost our innocence. I don’t think I’ll ever forget lying in bed that night and hearing the news on my clock radio – the disbelief and shock that I felt were unfamiliar emotions to me. In an instant the world became a different place.
I have to wonder if John Lennon would have written different lyrics to Imagine if he were writing that song today. I suppose he might have imagined a world without handguns, right? Yeah, me, too.
His hope for a world without religion probably wouldn’t have changed, but maybe he would have expanded upon that thought by wishing that we could live in a world where political candidates didn’t manipulate citizens with fear mongering and religious discrimination.
The rampant consumerism in our society probably would have bummed him out. The ever widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in our world shows that we have only grown more distant from Lennon’s ideal for “sharing all the world.” It seems that oversharing a la tabloids and reality television is what we really do best.
Who ever could have imagined the world in which we now are living? A world where dozens of children have been massacred in their schools because we’re too stupid as a society to prevent bad people from getting weapons? A country in which prospective presidential candidates are encouraging behaviors frighteningly reminiscent of the actions we took decades ago when we perpetrated gross civil liberty injustices against the Japanese, and, in more recent years, blacks and gays.
Unfortunately, I imagine we’re still a very long way from when the world will live as one.
DelSo 