This song is about how one might find a positive outlook in the state of the world by viewing history as a gradual evolution toward awareness and collective responsibility away from ignorance, superstition and greed. That doesn’t diminish the importance of voices that decry the dark things, but too often the radical view can come with a blind spot toward the progress and the good in the world. Even around 1910, Nicola Tesla (the genius inventor of many of the fundamental technologies which underpin modern society such as AC power, turbines, radio, flourescent light, and much more) spoke about how mankinds growing dependence of fossil fuels was a problem, well before the science of climate change and global warming was even conceived. Sure everyone now knows that dependence on fossil fuels has the planet on a nosedive we hope we can pull out of before we hit the ground, but not everyone in 1910 could look forward to see the implications. But what alternatives were there when mankind was solving the crucial question of movement of goods and people? What alternatives are there now? Sure there may be back engineered alien technology in a hangar somewhere that will give us access to unlimited free energy and anti-gravity, but so what? We’re always looking for an easy out, a shortcut. Like how the climate change debate is influenced by the right wing Christian movement particularly in America. What need does one have to think long term when one believes fervently in a magical rapture that will come and lift all the believers to heaven? God will ferry them all to heaven in his cadillac doing 3 miles to the gallon. If either God or aliens do exist then it's abundantly evident that they are leaving us to our own devices, much how a parent will encourage its child to learn the critical things for itself.

Nicola Tesla built drove an electric car in the 1920’s, so perhaps being sanguine rather than angry is the wrong approach when you consider that perhaps what we face ecologically could easily have been avoided. But the energy has to come from somewhere, while feeding an electric transport infrastructure may seem like an easy solution the hydrogen atom is the smallest particle containing a single positively-charged proton and a single negatively-charged electron and therefore very hard to contain store and contain. Its also volatile.

The title of the song refers to the timing signature which rather than recurring a bar with the same number of beats, the bars count down from eight beats to one and then the pattern starts again. The song uses the perspective of a character who is venting a frustration in the verses, then having a more positive epiphany in the choruses. The chorus comments on the fact that in the western world at least we do have the ability to think freely and express a view, communist China and Afghanistan under the Taliban are just two examples of the opposite of this basic right, however the western world should not be so smug in its supposed superiority. Surely while capitalism has for a brief flash in the long history of man granted few a level of luxury and insight never before seen, we have a long way to go before we can construct a society that affords the same security and freedom of identity to future generations. That’s where the song is coming from.