So I realize that it has been way too long since my last blog entry, and many of you have reminded me to post a new blog entry. So here it is.

Now the past few weeks have been quite busy and are most likely why I haven’t found the time to write. At the beginning of January I traveled down to Jamaica to work on my engineering project that I have spent the past semester on. The trip went extremely well and let’s just say a lot was accomplished. But beyond all of the meetings that took place, beyond all of the sites we went to visit, and beyond all the lessons I learned from the trip, there was something more important that stuck with me throughout the week spent in Jamaica. The music.

The odds were that when you would get in a car, you would be listening to reggae. When you drove through the streets or the small shopping plazas, you would come across large speaker stands with accompanying DJ’s entertaining the passing crowds with reggae. Reggae followed you on the island.

I am very grateful that I was able to spend the week with someone from Jamaica, rather than coming in as a pure tourist. We didn’t stay in the tourist section of the country. In fact we spent our time in a city with one of the highest crime rates in the world. This was not your white sands and blue oceans that you imagine of when you think of Jamaica.

Instead, the Jamaica that I got to know was one of people. It was their food, their music, their driving, their patwa, their religion, their hospitality. It was in their buildings and homes decorated with such an unfamiliar color palette. It was in the way they left their homes all day and spent their time with one another on sides of roads. It was how they greeted one another. It was their love for their country. Their pride for their culture. It was hard not to admire that love that they carried with them.

Now it is very hard to go more than a day without hearing something about Bob Marley while on the island. I had heard of Bob Marley beforehand and knew that he was a big name and brought reggae music to the global scale, but I didn’t know of Bob Marley’s songs. Yeah I would recognize one if it were played over the radio, but I couldn’t tell you what the songs were about, or more importantly why they were written. Well my one week in Jamaica served as a crash course to Bob Marley and I now have a much greater appreciation for what he accomplished. More importantly though, an appreciation for what he stood for.

A little bit ago, Time Magazine rated all of the famous songs over the past few decades and decided upon one single song as the song of the millennium. It’s a song that everyone has heard nearly all over the world. It carries a simple message and was the anthem of Bob Marley throughout his career. The song was entitled One Love, and the title speaks for itself. There’s not much more to it.

I love being able to analyze lyrics and try to find out what the songwriter meant by them. But then I looked up Bob’s song One Love. And there was nothing to analyze.

It didn’t win its title for being song of the millennium because of its deep meaning. It won the title for it’s’ simplicity.

I got the chance to walk through Bob’s house while in Jamaica and it was awesome to see how important his faith was to him. Bob was a Rasta and believed that the emperor of Ethiopia was the second Messiah and God incarnate. Now I don’t agree with what Bob believed in, but I admire how true he was to his beliefs. And I admire his idealism. At one of his concerts, Bob brought together the two opposing political party leaders of Jamaica together on stage and had them hold hands. He didn’t see why people couldn’t work together in unity.

As I go through college and talk with more and more people who have all kinds of experience in the real world, the whole idea of life as just dirty and things don’t work out how you’d like them to seems to surface more and more. I understand that I sometimes approach situations ideally and I’m told that as you get older, you begin to see things slightly more pessimistically. I wonder if that happens because theirs so few out there who feel that they can make a difference. Yeah there’s a lot of details that have to be looked over to make those changes in the world. And yeah there’s things that I don’t understand yet and will face down the road. But it seems that people like to tell you that the simple approach is rarely possible. But I wonder why Bob’s song was chosen as the song of the millenium. Out of all the songs out that have been written, a song which simply proposes getting together, praising the lord through one love, and feeling all right; is the one that was chosen.

Maybe it is that simple.