For this week’s Thursday Inspiration prompt, Jim Adams has asked us to respond to this challenge by either using the prompt word “day,” or by means of the song “Legend of a Mind,” or by going with another song by the Moody Blues, or any other song that mentions a counterculture icon that you like, or you can go with anything else that you think fits.

I decided to go with another Moody Blues song today. This song is arguably a counterculture song, even though it doesn’t specifically name an individual counterculture icon. According to Moody Blues guitarist/vocalist Justin Hayward, who wrote this song, it reflected the thoughts of many young people who were questioning the war in Vietnam.

Why do we never get an answer
When we're knocking at the door
With a thousand million questions
About hate and death and war?
'Cause when we stop and look around us
There is nothing that we need
In a world of persecution
That is burning in its greed

Hayward said he was just expressing his frustration around the problems of what many at the time, including yours truly, felt to be an unjust war. This was something that really concerned the students and young adults who formed the band’s audience. They were concerned for their own future and how having to fight in that war, should they be drafted, would be a moral dilemma for them.

He was personally angry at what was happening. “After a decade of peace and love,” Hayward said, “it still seemed we hadn’t made a difference in 1970.”

Well, Justin, I hate to break it to you, but more than half a century later, we are still waiting for an answer to that question about hate and love and war in the world of persecution that is burning in its greed.