Bonus Video - Look Towards the Land by Bruce Springsteen

I am certain I'm very late in coming across this song as a Springsteen fan, but I just had to post it here and share.

#95 Jackson Cage by Bruce Springsteen

“You can try with all your might
But you're reminded every night
That you been judged and handed life
Down in Jackson Cage”

Jackson Cage tells the story of life born behind the bars of socioeconomic inequality. This young woman feels she is just another faceless piece of her small world. Someone else’s twisted vision (“the hand that turns the key”) has cast her as an extra in the production of her own life. “Some folks are born into a good life”…and many are sentenced from day one to a life that feels like little more than punishment for someone else’s sins.

This nameless child swims upstream every day but every night finds herself back where she started. Her blinds are closed to any vision that may exist outside of her world. Like any cage, her life limits her awareness of other possibilities. She can only see the bars of injustice, and so she settles in to a life of survival.

Her story reminds us that “personal choice”, a buzz phrase that has swept the vocabularies of those who refuse to see the MUCH MUCH bigger picture of our world, is the smallest piece of the pie that allows someone to break out of their prison. When the life you are born into lands you, not even on first base, not even in the dugout, so far from any resemblance of a “good life”, that you cannot even see the field or even know that one exists, “personal choice” is not even in your awareness. At the very least, “personal choice” exists only in the realm of choosing the lesser of two evils.

And we are reminded of our human connectedness and our responsibility to help one another. Everything we do can change or perpetuate the cycle of poverty and hopelessness for our fellow man. “Without a vision people perish” (somewhere in the Bible). Instead of judging them as they may feel so many do and pushing them further from view, let us lend hope and a compassionate hand to “lives on the line” down in these isolated worlds, and help remove the bondage and barricades of these prison towns like Jackson Cage.

For Complete Lyrics Visit: http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/JacksonCage.html