Have you ever had a song you liked, and then when you looked up the lyrics you didn’t like it so much anymore?

Since I’m sitting here at the keyboard thinking about it, and it is tangentially related to the holiday today, I may as well put this out there.

This is “Waiting on the World to Change”, by John Mayer. It got stuck in my head last Wednesday morning, so I tracked it down on the internet, listened to it a few times and eventually the lyrics sank in. It was this line that made me look up the complete lyrics:

It’s not that we don’t care,
We just know that the fight ain’t fair
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

Young people, the fight’s never going to be fair. And if you wait, as the song suggests, until you’re the ones in charge, then you’ll have an even harder fight ahead of you, because your opposition is not going to rest and wait until they lose their advantage.

Today honors a man who knew that the fight was not and would not be fair, that changing things would require people willing to go to jail and even die. Not to guarantee victory, but merely to force a negotiation.

The world won’t change if we wait, we have to make it change.