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“Higher Ground” — Stevie Wonder
There probably hasn’t been a more important time for the world to come together and put aside the divisions of the past.
There’s been too much pain, too much violence, too much intolerance.
People we don’t agree with are “enemies”. People with different beliefs are the devil incarnate. People with a different skin colour are “less than human”.
Yet all this at a time when the world has never been richer (even if a greater proportion of that wealth is in the hands of fewer individuals than might be healthy). On average, at least, across the planet we’ve never been better fed, better educated or more wealthy.
At the same time, somehow our divisions have been stronger than ever of late. I’m starting to think there may be a glitch in our programming somewhere.
The mood of the moment, to quote George Michael’s prophetic words from 1990's “Praying For Time” (a tremendous song, by the way) seems to be…
But we’ll take our chances
’Cause God’s stopped keeping score
However, almost 20 years before George Michael wrote one of the finest songs of all time in “Praying For Time”, Stevie Wonder was calling on us all to reinvent a world which had been torn apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s by deep divisions over the war in Vietnam, racial…
