Cathedral song

Due to some unknown reason, today I couldn't stop thinking about the music "Cathedral Song" by Tanita Tikaram.

It's an old song that I love and that has a special meaning to me. When I was still in middle school, my teacher of creative writing class showed us some pictures and we should pick up one and then write a paper/article about it.

One of the pictures was a newspaper picture of a group of poor kids that lived in the streets. Sadly, this is a common scene in Brazil and in lots of places around the world.

There are thousands of reasons why those kids are in the streets and their histories are pretty much the same: they have no family, their families are poor, they were abandoned by their parents, they ran away from home because of parental abuse/violence.

Somehow those kids end up living in the streets and start to commit small crimes and, sometimes, they might even become real criminals.

I chose to write my paper about that picture and then I thought about the "Cathedral Song"...

I wrote an intro to my paper and transcribed the following part of the song:

"I saw you from the cathedral

You were leaving me

And I saw from the cathedral

You could not see to see

So take my time

And take my lies

'Cos all the others, they wanna take my life"

Then my paper was based in the fact that those kids - and the whole street population - are ignored by the rest of the society.

Street population is there, we know and we see it everyday, but the truth is that deep inside we try to avoid them as much as possible.

We pass by them everyday, but them we try to make ourselves blind. It is not nice to face the truth and to face someone poor and starving near us, so we pretend they are invisible.

Sometimes we are afraid of being robbed, so we just hold our purses tight against our bodies or just cross the street as if they wouldn't notice what we're doing! Come on, those kids aren't dumb!

Obviously I include myself among the people who hold the purse stronger and cross the street, ashame on me!

They might be little thieves and even mean sometimes, but the truth is that they are just kids... Kids who had lost innocence, kids with no dreams, but, afterall, they are still just kids...

The idea of my paper was: the street kid is there and he is "talking" to a lady who passes by him without even looking at his face... He has quited about his life and changing his future, but deep inside he wants to be saved by someone. He wants help and that is exactly what we are all not giving him.

I know this a very cliché topic, and again I dont wanna make boring speechs to you guys but how long will it last? We are responsible for those kids, and how long will we be negligent about them? What are we doing to our kids and to ourselves?

Unfortunatelly, I don't have the solution for that. Actually, the solution is obvious: we just need to care about those kids and give them some respect and opportunities.

Anyways, today I thought a lot about this song and the paper I wrote so I decided to write again about it. Since I have lots of free time, I also made the following video.

Hope you like it.

Take care!