My take on this song is similar to my take on "Purple, Yellow, Red & Blue," but from the opposite perspective. It's told from the point of view of someone who has become heavily disillusioned from the constant onslaught of technology-provided information (the internet) and is trying to disassociate himself from the horrors of the modern problems that are online-- the "hungry people" and "the war" are metaphors for technozombies who engage in anonymous arguments over the third world and various military conflicts but never making a true point.
The storyteller says that "we watch the sun come up just to take down and hide it," I think what he means is that people are so attached to their computers, cell phones and internet that they don't sleep right, anymore (nobody goes to "sleep when the sun goes down" anymore), and that we've hidden "the sun" aka the light of day, reality, connection to the real reality, the real flesh only to hide behind the dots of light traveling up and down the information superhighway.
So, then he says he just wants to 'try and forget that the times have changed,' in the days since about 2001, humanity has gotten a technological boost a thousand times more advanced than the technological progresses made during World War I and World War II combined, and that we're all just "plastic soldiers" SLOWLY growing older using our computers who are also "plastic soldiers NEVER growing older."
My take on this song is similar to my take on "Purple, Yellow, Red & Blue," but from the opposite perspective. It's told from the point of view of someone who has become heavily disillusioned from the constant onslaught of technology-provided information (the internet) and is trying to disassociate himself from the horrors of the modern problems that are online-- the "hungry people" and "the war" are metaphors for technozombies who engage in anonymous arguments over the third world and various military conflicts but never making a true point.
The storyteller says that "we watch the sun come up just to take down and hide it," I think what he means is that people are so attached to their computers, cell phones and internet that they don't sleep right, anymore (nobody goes to "sleep when the sun goes down" anymore), and that we've hidden "the sun" aka the light of day, reality, connection to the real reality, the real flesh only to hide behind the dots of light traveling up and down the information superhighway.
So, then he says he just wants to 'try and forget that the times have changed,' in the days since about 2001, humanity has gotten a technological boost a thousand times more advanced than the technological progresses made during World War I and World War II combined, and that we're all just "plastic soldiers" SLOWLY growing older using our computers who are also "plastic soldiers NEVER growing older."