It is difficult to find any optimism out of what is going on right now in Israel and Gaza. But in 2002, during another period of darkness in the world, Steve Earle tried to find some hope in his song “Jerusalem,” the title track of his 2002 album. There, he sang a fine day where “all the children of Abraham / Will lay down their swords forever in Jerusalem.”
And there’ll be no barricades then;
There’ll be no wire or walls;
And we can wash all this blood from our hands,
And all this hatred from our souls.
At the time of the album’s release, William Bowers, who was not a fan of Earle generally, in a Pitchfork review mocked such a utopian take on the complicated situation in the Middle East. Bowers saw some attempts to follow John Lennon’s “Imagine” but finds such a plea ultimately doomed for a land divided by religion and race. He concludes, “the song is dang hard to take seriously.”
Earle, though, realizes his song’s dream is a long-shot and, as he explains in the video below, that the dream may remain a dream until he dies. And in the lyrics, he sings, “maybe I’m only dreamin’ and maybe I’m just a fool.”
It is foolish to think of any hope now during all of the horrors going on while people are suffering and dying. But maybe trying to imagine peace is not a bad thing to do, even if it feels futile at the moment.
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