We Didn't Start the Fire
We sat behind a family at the Billy Joel concert. Mom, dad, older sister, her husband, younger sister, her bestie, son, girlfriend. The girls, at least, had clearly grown up listening to their parents' Billy Joel albums, because they kept getting each other's attention and doing dance moves choreographed sometime between size 6x and the juniors section.
I loved watching them. Also, they were almost the youngest people there. Beloved and I, at 41, were bringing down the average age of the crowd in our section all by ourselves, and these glorious children young adults were probably fifteen years younger than we are.
I sat (because you sit when you're old and surrounded by other old people terrified to have another beer lest they have to once again roust the entire row to use the restroom) and thought how nice it must be to be Billy Joel and see your music unite so many generations. Or just to be someone capable of filling stadiums for decades. For DECADES. Props, Billy Joel.
Then he sang a song I'd heard he said he wouldn't ever sing again because he kept forgetting the lyrics: "We Didn't Start the Fire." These are those lyrics:
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio
Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe
Rosenbergs, H-Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye
Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc
Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock
Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland
Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide...
Buddy Holly, Ben-Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go
U-2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion
Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson
Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician Sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan
Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller Cola wars, I can't take it anymore
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
But when we are gone
It will still burn on and on and on and on
And on and on and on and on...
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No, we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it
I watched the younger sister dance in front of me, and I remembered memorizing the lyrics to that song as a teenager. But now, it's us in Afghanistan instead of the Russians. And we still have homeless vets. And boy, terror on the airline went bigger than ever since this song was written. Race relations, um, yeah.
But now it's not me and my generation singing that song. It's my generation doing the stuff.
That twirling twentysomething in front of me is who should be singing the song.
I looked around at the Baby Boomers on either side of me and tried to decide whether to be depressed or hopeful. We didn't light it, but the kids didn't, either.
Will it ever go out?