A call to arms to a new generation

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” --Dwight D. Eisenhower

The quote above, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, and now adopted by Roger Waters to embody the spirit of Pink Floyd’s famous album The Wall has appeared in the end of April/ beggining of May across various locations in New York and Los Angeles as vivid graphic projections, wheat pastings and chalk drawings. This was a call to arms to a new generation of fans, to not sit idly by and believe what is being told to them, but to constantly question, and find the answers they seek by breaking down walls.

This quote below, taken from a recent interview with famed British journalist David Frost, explains the message behind Water’s selection of the Eisenhower quote:

“I was reading an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times by Bob Herbert and came across this quote. It made me think, we need to hang onto words of these wise people from our past. I’m far more focused on trying to sort out where the walls that we face now lie. Whether there are media walls, there are certainly economic walls, and there are walls that are more subtle and insidious than the war between North and South, the war between rich and poor. We are the first generation to have had a real chance to get to some of the truth at what’s going on and in consequence possibly be able to sort out what to do about it and for successive generations to have a better chance than we to sort out the truth from the lies, the wheat from the chaff.”

The photo below, taken April 29th in New York City’s Union Square, illustrates the projections in practice: