"Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.”

--Tao Te Ching, Chapter 46

I’ve just become aware of a song from a young fellow by the name of Billy Gilman, who might be more familiar to you than he was to me. It’s called “One Voice,” and I understand he was all of twelve years old at the time he put this down for the album of the same name.

I don’t know any more details than that, because this song has a touch of something that makes me want to stay away from anything else in its immediate family.

If you’ve run across my musical tastes in our almost-nightly chats, you’ll realize that instead of phony genre divisions, I usually separate music into two broad categories: Music I Like and Music I Torture Myself With. Not a lot of people seem to get what I’m hitting at with the concept of Torture Music. They just think I’ve got screwed-up tastes, and I guess the pictures from uglypeople.com I posted didn’t help my case much. There is much more to it than that, though. Sometimes a bad song, especially a technically incompetent one, can act like an enema, cleaning out your music-appreciation colon for a batch of classics, setting the bar so low that nothing that follows could possibly let you down.

Then, there are songs that fall in the Torture Music category just because something in them rubs me the wrong way. That’s what we’ve got here.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I’m not necessarily out to get Billy Gilman. I'm sure he's a really good kid, and I hope that he avoids the rotten quirks of fate that hit a lot of pre-teen stars. I’m just out to get this song; these soft-spoken, world-gone-wrong anthems always get to me, no matter who sings them. Billy just happened to be on my mountain the day the avalanche started. I’m sure if you can play this song without listening too deeply, it seems like a sad elegy to innocence that dies too soon because the world intrudes. However, I cannot approach this with anything less than a fully critical (possibly hypercritical) mind, and when you listen to this song really closely...well, let’s just say I sense a great disturbance in the Force.

Any hopes that maybe we’re really going to really see through the eyes of a child are cut down when you press “play” and hear “Some kids have and some kids don’t/ and some of us are wonderin’ why”. Now, since I never bought the album, I don’t know if Billy wrote this himself or if was someone on his "team", but already we're far too self-conscious for comfort. Although they couch this in soft, non-accusatory phraseology, this line can turn two ways. On the one hand, he could be blaming the MAN for keeping some of his friends’ parents down, which makes me ask which man, since in the obligatory melancholy video that accompanies this song, all his schoolmates on the bus are white. The other possibility, which is even more unsettling, is he’s blaming his friends’ parents for being losers too rotten to get or keep a job that makes enough money to put food on the table. Since we’re only one line into the song, it could swing either way, but what follows later seals the deal for the parents.

Oh yes, there’s the bit about mom not watching the news anymore because too many things on it make her cry. Of course, my mother stopped watching the news quite a while ago as well, but that’s because it conflicted with her Dragonball Z schedule. Anyway, I have a whole other rant on the back burner about how a lot of things that qualify as “national news” these days are really only regional stories that look sexy with cool CNN-style CGI graphics, but I think this one deserves its own full treatment, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

I’ll also avoid the temptation of saying that if his mom freaks out over the news this bad, maybe she should watch the Weather Channel instead--except during tornado season. She should probably stay away from Red Cross commercials, too. Maybe she’s just crying at Billy’s haircut in the video.

I just realized I typed all that instead of thinking it. Damn.

The second verse trots out the usual Wonder Years good-old-days imagery you find in so many of these songs: a house with a yard (presumably with a picket fence, and presumably without vicious attack dogs), a road where it was safe to ride your bike, and moms and dads that believed in the Golden Rule. Then, in an moment as emotionally manipulative as a political ad from the ultra-right (or ultra-left, to be fair), the video counterpart for this last line is a slow motion argument between a “mom” and a “dad” in their yard, as if to say your parents are losers.

At this point, dear friends, my mood changes. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I believe this is the perfect point to mention how utterly galling I find the whole “mouths-of-babes” wing of pop culture social commentary to be. Basically, we have a kid allegedly going over all the awful things in the world and how sad it makes him--allegedly because I have my doubts that Billy actually wrote this song himself. To steal a few lines from the late Bill Hicks, we have access to over two thousand years of Western and Eastern philosophy, works of the greatest minds of all time, thinkers with the highest of ideals. But OH! what’s that little kid over there saying? Let’s put his thoughts on Compact Disc, so they’ll last forever.

There was an episode of “Mr. Belvedere”, an otherwise innocuous ‘80s situation comedy, which, while it didn’t start this odious trend, rode it for all it was worth. Wesley was the youngest of this wacky and zany TV family, and when his friend contracts AIDS from tainted blood, the parents freaked out. Li’l Wes stood up to the hysterical parents and, in effect, began reciting the government pamphlet about the disease. Although this kid was not even one-third the age of anybody in the audience, he calmed their fears and saved the day.

I was turning the corner of fourteen at the time, and although at the time I was the most uncritical viewer God had ever graced the American networks with, even I recognized how full of bovine excrement this situation was. Putting aside the fact that it was done for a good cause, we must keep in mind this is a little kid giving a roomful of adults a dressing down without one of them threatening to flatten the kid’s ears if he doesn’t shut up. The world is full of kids and teenagers who seem to think they know better than their elders and more often than not fail when they’re asked to prove it. Not surprisingly, more than a few country song-lectures have been written about this very subject from the adult side of the coin. Kids don’t lecture adults...ever. If they do, they don’t usually get away with it, except on television.

Trust me. They’ve saved the worst for the last verse.

Little Billy, walking home along Newbury Road (the video has him riding the bus home along Newbury Road, but by this point I’m concentrating more on not gouging my eardrums out with a pencil than with inconsistencies), sees a kid from school pull a pistol from his bag and drop it off a bridge into the river. When the chorus comes back around again, he thanks God for the “help”, as if this was the answer to the “thousand prayers” winged up to Heaven.

And this, my friends, is what really sends me off the deep end about this song and its freeze-dried sadness for the world. Whoever little Billy’s handlers are seem content to fill his mouth with all these problems and phony nostalgia, but when it comes to actual solutions, all they can come up with is praying and throwing a gun in a river. My main problem is that we have too many questioners in this country, and not a lot of people striving for answers. Everybody knows what the problems are, unless you like high crime, unclean air, and a dwindling national literacy rate. NOW WHAT?

Yeah, I know, he’s just a kid. Yeah, I know kids aren’t supposed to have answers to the heavy mysteries of life. Still, as a child of the 70's, I’ve been raised on a steady diet of songs and stories rattling off the problems of the world, but very few solutions. Sure, blaming the government is easy and fun, even profitable at times, but if you’re not in with the Feds, it’s kind of hard to turn them around.

There’s a saying you might have heard of from the 60's, and the reason you’re still hearing it is because in spite of its bumper-sticker brevity, it’s actually relevant to the world and its problems. It’s a little something called “Think globally, act locally.” There are plenty of things you can do, if you clear all your head of this impotent howling you’ve been programmed with and look at the world as if your mind was a blank slate. Look around you without preconceived notions and you’re sure to find lots of small but important things within your abilities that you can do to set at least part of the world right. You can’t disarm every last criminal in America, and you’d be foolhardy to try, but you can join the Big Brothers of America, and possibly stop a child from becoming a criminal. You can give to Habitat for Humanity or Comic Relief, and help people who desperately need a roof over their heads. If you see a kid from a milk carton picture on the street in your town, you can call the number on the milk carton. Kids can go the Nickelodeon Big Help route. Hell, you can do the world a favor and help make Bush Jr. a one-term president.

You can even pray, if you’re so inclined, but don’t forget to actually do something tangible. The idea that these problems are going to go away by themselves if we pretend that they’re not there or, even worse, look moonily out a window as the world spirals into hell, is the very reason that they’re as big as they are. You can actually make things happen without endangering yourself or your consumerist lifestyle. Faith without action doesn’t work very well; even your minister will tell you that.

What the kid with the gun--who we’ll call the Kid With The Gun for simplicity’s sake--is doing might also be considered a small act of kindness to the world, until you actually clear your head and SEE what’s happening.

Why do you say that, Easy?

(Don’t worry, folks, dark humor follows...)

The answer to this question is hidden in another question: when the hell have you ever seen anybody throwing any gun into any river because they hate guns? The answer is never. Handguns usually cost quite a bit, enough that average buyers wouldn’t just throw them away. You want a gun out of the house, you sell the gun.

There is only one plausible reason that anybody, even a kid, would be tossing a gun into a river, as even an occasional true-crime fan will tell you, and that is disposal of evidence. In the real world, that Kid With The Gun would’ve shot and possibly killed somebody.

Billy Gilman had better hope the Kid With The Gun doesn’t spot him. Witnesses to a murder coverup usually put themselves in danger if they’re spotted. The Kid With The Gun is definitely more dangerous than Billy, and probably bigger than Billy, too. He’s killed once, I’m sure he’ll kill again, and probably have something else to toss in the river below.

I’ll bet he has a knife tucked away in his tube socks for just such an eventuality.

I’ll bet he’s reaching for it right now.

RUN, BILLY, RUN!

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