Imagine!

 John Lennon was spot on, as they say.

We need to act from these imaginations.

The Wisdom of John Lennon༺

"The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

Love is like a precious plant. You can’t just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on by itself. You’ve got to keep on watering it. You’ve got to really look after it and nurture it.

We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad daylight.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.

You don’t need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are! There’s nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can’t wake you up. Only you can wake you up. I can’t cure you, only you can cure you.

You’re all geniuses, and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you’ll get it as soon as you like.

That’s what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It’s just that the translations have gone wrong.

Peace is not something you wish for; it’s something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away. Declare it. Just the same way we declare war. That is how we will have peace… we just need to declare it.

Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.

My role in society, or any artist’s or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end."

~John Lennon

The Playing For Change version of Imagine:

All the new thoughts about making any future plans say you have to have a vision, an idea in mind, toward which to move. What's yours?

And so these words can take us to feeling better, safer, more secure and hopeful.

Do they stay with us very long?

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Here is a quote from Jeff Teidrich, who likes to use the S-word and F-word as if that makes him more appealing to some readers. But when he asked

"What Kind of Shithole Country lets a Corrupt Criminal Run For President?"

I quote just a bit about his views on how we got here...

" our founders assumed that their spiffy new system of government was going to be forever run by “honorable” people. the bewigged-and-powdered landed gentry who wrote the rules didn’t imagine that knaves and scoundrels would be allowed to rise to positions of power.

and so Tommy Paine and Benny Franklin and T-Jeff and all their homeys formed a government that leaned a lot on the honor system, with surprisingly few hard-and-fast laws regulating the conduct of elected officials.

they assumed every president was going to fit the mold of George Washington, choosing to set aside the trappings of royalty and voluntarily doing what’s best for the country.

they certainly never anticipated that an entire political party would fall under the spell of a 91-count criminal mob boss.

oh, you starry-eyed dreamers.

let me introduce you to Donald Trump, and his lawless band of Republican cutthroats."

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and then the next day Tiedrich said:

"this is your modern-day Republican party.

no ideas, no policies, no principles, nothing to make the lives of We the People better.

just grudges, grievances and score-settling."