Reagan Youth Poem Analysis

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When most people think of punks, they usually think of a bunch of goons that don’t care about anything and just want to smoke cigs and do drugs all day, but this is very far from the truth. Punks, despite their reputation, were highly active in multiple social movements, such as the environmental movement. While caring about the environment is usually attributed to the hippie movement, and rightfully so, the punks had their own, more aggressive way of conveying their message about environmental destruction. The band “Reagan Youth” is a perfect example of the punk approach to the environmental movement. The band’s name come the Hitler Youth, which blindly followed their leader’s orders, and pokes fun at how many of the younger people in America …show more content…

Cattle Decapitation was founded in 1996 and is still making music today, their most recent album The Anthropocene Extinction reached the top 100 in the US charts, and was number 5 in the Top Rock Albums charts. The album focuses on mankind's effect on the environment, and how if we do not change our ways soon, the human race is doomed to extinction. One of their songs off of that album is named “Pacific Grim” and is about how we are destroying the Pacific Ocean in countless ways. It opens with the lyrics “A nuclear accident, Vomits into the ocean, An island of garbage, Forged by the discarded, The constant trawling, Modifying habitats, What the fuck are we doing?”. Already, many environmental disasters are referenced: Nuclear waste leaking into the ocean, destroying ecosystems; The island of garbage the size of texas that is floating in the Pacific Ocean, killing fish, turtles, and many other mammals; and lastly, overfishing, which is decimating native fish populations and is causing many species to get closer and closer to extinction. All of this is referenced within the first thirty seconds of the song. The final line of the opening lyrics, “What the fuck are we doing”, ties back in with the sentiment that all the other bands previously mentioned have: we know we’re destroying the environment, we know what we’re doing is wrong, why don’t we care and why are we doing it? The chorus of the song shows that the band feels that the human race is naturally destructive and evil, which can be seen in the lyrics “They never stood a chance, Against this sick romance, We have with every living being, We have with every fucking thing”. These lyrics show that the band believes that the human race has a “sick romance” with killing everything around us. This sentiment can also be seen in another song off of the same album, called “Not Suitable for Life”.

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