Compassion Fatigue

Our society faces a real, and threatening problem, that has been growing faster and faster throughout the years. It’s called “Compassion Fatigue”, and it basically means that with the constant development of media and information, and the excruciating bombing of images and news which we receive every day, (mainly), through television, our eyes, brain and eventually our selves, got used to see the most horrible things, with the ability to carry on with our lives, without even thinking about others problems, or feeling almost any compassion during the 24 hours of our days.

It’s not really something that the main public wants to be, but most of us watch, and listen, the most horrible news and still, we are capable to change the channel without making any expression of compassion, understanding, or the urge to do something to change what is bad in this world. We see every day on the news, stories about kids in Africa and their miserable lives, murders, corruption, images of war and this stuff is shown so many times, that our brain got used to it. Just like a few decades ago, if a man saw the leg of a woman, he would jerk off for a fucking month. Nowadays, seeing a naked woman is something banal. Don’t get me wrong, this is not the real problem. Showing what is happening in the world, or showing some tits and penis is not wrong. What I believe it’s wrong, is to put censorship in the middle of those things.

Trying to make people more comfortable when they watch strong images, is going to do even worst. If you want to compassion fatigue to end, end censorship. Censorship, makes something strong, into something banal, that we don’t give importance. If you want to show the consequences of a war, show the dead bodies, show the blood, and the mutilated faces, show the raping, show the executions, show the cursing, show everything. Only that way, people will pay attention, only that way people will find new things, will change their ways of thinking.
Only this way people will want to change the world.  If they puke with disgust, even better, they will remember it. If they get “traumatized”, they will never forget it.
If you want to shake this world, shake the people too. Show them what you can only see if you have a strong stomach. Make people cry and have nightmares about those who suffer every single fucking day!

Show and say everything, maybe people will give everything too. 

– Guilherme Pedrosa

Music, what it was, what it is, and what it will be…

Music traveled with mankind throughout it’s history. When society changed or needed a change, music changed too. Music lacks of spirit nowadays, and needs a transformation. What the fuck happened to music? What caused this?

1. The Past
Music was a form of expressing deep feelings, express anger, happiness, political views and philosophical views, unfortunately we lost that. Music was able to change minds and moods in matters of second. Music told the truth. It triggered the good and bad in each one of us, love, universe, society, feelings… It was ugly and beautiful.
Don’t get me wrong though. We always had lame bands and singers, but even those had some talent. They had morals, they felt what they were singing. Creativity was lost, experiences were always being done with instruments and new ways of expression. Music had a “boom” and you could fit anywhere you wanted. You had Punk, Rock, Grunge, Blues, Jazz, Reggae, Hip Hop and so much more. The Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Kids, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, Living Color, Rage Against The Machine, Radiohead, Cake, Anvil, Blur, The Flaming Lips, Jerry Lee Lewis, Joe Cocker, Lou Reed, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, The Kinks, Mr. Bungle, The Pixies, Spin Doctors, The Pop Group, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Stone Temple Pilots, The Stone Roses, Sonic Youth, B.B.King, John Maher, Howlin’ Wolf, War, Cab Calloway, Nina Simone, Fred Anderson, Bob Marley, Sublime, Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and so many more, unfortunately I can’t name them all.
All of them had great musicians, and brought creativity and real and deep feelings to their songs. Why have we lost this amazing fucking bands? What happened?

2. The Present
The real reason music has lost it’s meaning is simple. Money and society. I believe this two things rotten music. Before this world crisis, we had money, everybody was happy and blinded by the capitalist dream, at least the ones that could actually hear music, because some had nothing. The industry of music changed, minds changed, and instead of personal expression and meaning for the music, we wanted money. Money caught music. It was the first priority, to make money. Adding that with the lazy fat and “puppetish” society, music started to die.
Music has no creativity and has a plastic false content. It’s all about, how you are not alone in this world and how you will be happy, we all know that is false. They don’t mean anything of what they say on their songs, they don’t care.
While music channels had music and accepted new music, nowadays MTVs and shit like that only have stupid reality shows, and only accept music that have boobs, or a guy with a six pack that looks like a girl and reads lyrics from a paper. We actually got to this sad point, where music is weaker than ever. Fortunately, there are some  bands/singers that actually can make good music. The Black Keys, Jamiroquai, Gorillaz, At The Drive-In, Bloc Party, Blood Red Shoes, Cage The Elephant, Das Racist, Dead Weather, Death From Above 1979, Death Grips, Efterklang, Every Time I Die, Johnossi, Justice, Lightning Bolt, M.I.A, Mumford And Sons, OFWGKTA, The Rapture, Seasick Steve, Streetlight Manifesto, Tom Vek, Willy Moon, The Subways, Tame Impala, White Stripes, Yeasayer and many more, but, once again, I can’t name them all.

3. The Future
What will happen to music? I strongly believe that music will not die, and will actually rise up again. We are facing the greatest problems of humanity, people are dying, people are changing, people are mad, and are getting tired of this capitalism bullshit we live in. All of this will be reflected in music, the anger, the agony, and all of this shit we are surrounded by.
I think we will face another “music boom” and music will be born again. Good, and real music, will be heard again.
With society (r)evolution, we will have a music (r)evolution.

– Guilherme Pedrosa

Circular Society

Throughout history, if we look closely, despite religion being always present, society didn’t always had the problems that we face today, and on the other hand, have faced  todays problems too.
Since the beginning exists – just like in most of animal species that live in our planet – a hierarchy. There ‘s always those who have more power and who have less.

Society is something that doesn’t go forward in a straight line, but evolves in a circular shape. The rights that exist nowadays in our society of  women, homosexuals and different races, where rights that actually existed in the past. Greeks and Romans tolerate homosexuals, actually, the first sexual experiences that greek boys had been with males too. Romans practiced homosexual sex, in an era where sexuality was very important and explored. The Egyptians had female governors, queens and Pharaohs, whatever you want to call them. And, it seems that human evolution started in Africa, and, due to its climate humans had dark skin, I bet no one was racist back then.
We already had a society tolerant to homosexuals, but now in our present society, they are considered by many inferior. In ancient Egypt, women possessed power, and in other civilizations, they were adored by their incredible beauty, however in an allegedly more sophisticated society, women were consider inferior to men, and colored people started to get discriminated.
Obviously, ancient societies had their problems too, just like the Mayans that decapitated people to honor their Gods.
Even fashion is a circle, where we can see that clothes wore in the 20’s, 30’s and 40’s are brought back to life.

Society evolves, in a circular shape, that when gains knowledge adds it to the circle, and realizing that some of the ideas are wrong, takes them out of the circle.
Unfortunately, lots of problems present in society were created and brought by religion, that in a way shuts down the brains of people, allowing them to see, what only one man sees.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” – Albert Einstein
And that’s exactly the problem of our society, we always try to solve our problems the same way we started them. Religion is the source of lots of problems in the world, then why people use religion to solve those problems, that religion once created?

– Guilherme Pedrosa 

Freedom?

What is freedom? The word, the feeling and the meaning of freedom is really hard to achieve nowadays. Different people have different views on what freedom, really is. For some, freedom is if they are simply happy with life and nothing goes wrong, for others is if they can think freely and express themselves in the way they want to. Some, even tied by the many rules of different religions, consider themselves free. So what is freedom after all?

Let’s begin discovering the meaning of the word, “freedom”. In a very short sentence, freedom is the exemption from external control, interference, regulation and dependence.
Reading carefully the description of freedom, we see that it is, actually absent. Everything in this world, is connected. And I really mean everything, I challenge you, and anyone here to point out something that isn’t somehow dependent of something else. It’s really a tough challenge, because everything is dependent of something.

Now we get to the point where we have just realized that the word “freedom” is actually a paradox. But we can’t let this feeling, this word die like this. Millions of lives were taken to achieve and defend “freedom”. You may ask yourself, if there is nothing free, then why do people fight for it?

I personally like to call it “Human Freedom”. Human freedom does not have the same meaning as the word “freedom”, I added the word “human”, to complete it. With human before freedom, the meaning of the word totally changes. Instead of referring to the absence of dependence overall, it focus only on human connections. Being able to express yourself freely, not being a slave to someone else, the choice to be whatever you want is what human freedom really is.

Freedom itself does not exist, but human freedom does, our freedom. Because after all, humans worst enemy are humans. Don’t get me wrong and think that I believe in Governments crap, I am a supporter of logic, and our laws and society are not working, we need to change and fast. I am a great supporter of The Zeitgeist Movement, and I believe that not even one side of political views can be totally correct, there is no such thing as perfection.

Think!

– Guilherme Pedrosa