Us and Them - A Metaphor

An interview with Mark VanLaeys

Feb 24, 2024

Hi all,

Thank you for joining me for today’s song, “Us and Them - A Metaphor”, by Mark VanLaeys. If you’d like to hear the song before you read the background, I’ve included a YouTube video below the article.

✳️ Note: The level of this article is for students with a TOEIC of 550+, Eiken Pre-1, CEFR B2. For Japanese students, vocabulary words in bold are provided in Japanese below.

The Interview

(684 words)

We are fortunate to have the writer of today’s song with us. Mark VanLaeys has kindly agreed to be interviewed! Mark is a fellow writer here at Substack, and for those of you who read Songs of Social Significance often, you might have seen some of his thoughts in the comments sections. That’s how I came to learn about him and found out that he is a very talented songwriter.

Louise: Tell us a little about yourself, Mark. Where are you from? How did you start writing music?

Mark: My youth was spent in several New Jersey suburbs near Philadelphia. We didn’t have much room for music in our house when I was growing up. Our family life was complicated. I did take guitar lessons for a year or two. But even then, I only played or sang within the walls of my bedroom until my final two years of high school when I started writing and sharing that music.

In college, I became a “disc jockey” at our school’s radio station. That’s when I learned about traditional folk and acoustic music. I also saw that song-writing was a way of communicating.

Louise: What did you study at university?

Mark: I was a medical student, so I learned a lot about the sciences. Even more importantly, I learned to ask questions. The Vietnam War was at its high point, and on the nightly news, we saw plane loads of coffins arriving almost every day. I started to realize that so much of the suffering in the world was related to issues of control and materialism, and my country was one of the main supporters of this evil. I could either add to that suffering by doing nothing, or work toward ending it.

Louise: Do you think most people can do something to help?

Mark: Well, I learned that everyone has special tools to find their own place in the world. My tools are music and medicine, and I use them to make my place.

Louise: Why did you write “The Meteor”?

Mark: I wrote “The Meteor” during April of 2020.

Louise: Oh, that was right around the time that the COVID pandemic was spreading.

Mark: Right. I had hoped that the same countries that were repeatedly fighting or competing with each other on the world stage would come together in laboratories and conference halls to globally address the deadly pandemic. This was an unprecedented opportunity for people to work together on a common goal.

Louise: How do you think that was handled?

Mark: Obviously we here in the United States failed terribly. The president at the time, Donald Trump, made light of the possible disaster the virus could cause. The pandemic, especially in its early stages, was nothing but a political football, and millions of people in the U.S. and around the world would pay the price.

Louise: So, how does “The Meteor” fit into this scenario?

Mark: The overall message of “The Meteor” is still HOPE. In spite of the poor response of the government, we all saw so many heroes all around the world working without rest to minimize the devastation. Doctors, nurses, and workers who kept the supplies we use every day delivered and in the stores, all of these people pulled together at great personal risk to serve the public good.

Louise: We certainly owe a great deal of gratitude to the people who have helped us through the years of the pandemic. Mark, do you have a message for the students who are reading this article today?

Mark: There are people who say that we’re too different to get along. I say we should always work together to fix big problems, even if we are a little different from one another. The pandemic is mostly over, but the Earth is still getting too warm. People would work together to stop a huge meteor from hitting us. It’s like that. We need to join forces to stop this problem.

Louise: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with us. We wish you well with your future songwriting projects.

The Song

US AND THEM - A Metaphor

(681 words)

The main idea of this song asks a question: How would we behave if a meteor were coming toward the earth? In 2020, Mark saw a meteor as a metaphor for the COVID virus. COVID put everyone on the same level. No one was better than anyone else. The virus can attack any one of us, so we’re all in the same situation.

Who would have thought that some dream could come true

about a meteor chasin’ all of us together?

The playing field now flat. There are no chosen few

just mere humans on the same boat together

The songwriter thinks about “us” and “them” standing in the same line (maybe waiting for assistance?). The flags of countries can’t protect us.

Imagine all of us and them for once in the same line

No upper hand, no wavin’ flag can save us

The only way to overcome the situation would be to trust each other and to have the greatest thinkers from each country work together to find a solution.

We’d have to trust our neighbor

pool the great minds from our world

We could right this ship and start a course together

That’s not how it turned out. As the pandemic spread, some people just ignored what scientists were telling us. To batten down the hatches means to use pieces of wood to lock the openings on a boat, in other words, prepare for bad weather. Here, it means that many people prepared for themselves but did not care about others. This is similar to how many people don’t really care about what happens to the planet.

Who would have thought as the horror unfolds across the globe

some would batten down the hatches?

Ignoring our connections to the science and the soul

of our planet as it’s mired in devastation

Hatch on a boat. Photo: Jean-Pierre Bazard (Wikimedia Commons)

If we only think about ourselves, we cannot care about others. If we want to continue living on this planet, though, we will have to stop our greed, our petty (not important) desires.

Fear and greed have always lacked compassion without love

Division like a sword cuts through our children

The lifeline to our future, goes beyond petty desires

to survival for a hundred generations

Who would have thought we could veer from our ways?

Coastal tides have a way of stealing favors

Yet, in the next lines, we sense hope. If we worked together, we could heal ourselves and the planet.

As the years flow by, these days could leave their mark

as the time we all stopped to fill the crater

Fear and greed have always lacked compassion without love

Perhaps we should be directing our anger not at others who seem different from us, but at a group that benefits if we hate each other.

Misplaced anger drives the wedge between us

The lifeline to our future goes beyond the here and now

to survival for a hundred generations

Questions:

1) In the song, we find the lyric, These days could leave their mark as the time we all stopped to fill the crater What do you think “the crater” means?

2) If you could ask Mark VanLaeys a question, what would you ask him?