Changes: It Seems Heaven-Sent

This would've been more timely two weeks ago, but I've stopped pretending to myself that I'm either cutting-edge or quick on the draw.*

Anyway, it wasn't too likely, but Tupac's "Changes" should've been the Obama theme song.


Kinda obvious why it wasn't, but it should've been.

I'm not sure when he recorded it, but it was released posthumously, so maybe twelve or thirteen years ago. Anyway, Pandora popped it up just now for me, and I was struck how it sounds both outdated and painfully relevant at once:

"Changes"
...
I see no changes wake up in the morning and I ask myself
Is life worth living? Should I blast myself?
...
We gotta start makin' changes,
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers.
And that's how it's supposed to be—
How can the Devil take a brother if he's close to me?
I'd love to go back to when we played as kids,
But things changed, and that's the way it is...

I see no changes all I see is racist faces.
Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races.
We under, I wonder what it takes to make this
One better place. Let's erase the waste,
Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right,
'Cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight,
And only time we chill is when we kill each other.
It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven-sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President.
It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact:
The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks.
But some things will never change...

And still I see no changes can't a brother get a little peace
It's war on the streets & the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me...

It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live,
And let's change the way we treat each other.
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
what we gotta do, to survive.

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* Or original. I just did a Google search and am shocked--shocked!--to discover that I'm not the first person to have had this thought. Whatever. Time-traveling plagiarism artists and other haters will not drag me down.