I'm in agreement with llscience. Pompeii is used as a metaphor to describe somebody standing still, looking out as their life falls apart and swallows them whole. It seems to me that the narrator is somebody who has big dreams but becomes content working a regular job and living a regular life. One day they stop and look out at their life realizing that it's not what they had always dreamed about. They've been stuck in this monotonous, never-changing life that doesn't live up to what they'd hoped. And now in this realization, they start to lose that optimism that...

I'm in agreement with llscience. Pompeii is used as a metaphor to describe somebody standing still, looking out as their life falls apart and swallows them whole. It seems to me that the narrator is somebody who has big dreams but becomes content working a regular job and living a regular life. One day they stop and look out at their life realizing that it's not what they had always dreamed about. They've been stuck in this monotonous, never-changing life that doesn't live up to what they'd hoped. And now in this realization, they start to lose that optimism that kept them going before of being something more. Quite genius really.

Many of us (Christians, Heathens, Pagans, Atheists) celebrate the cultural aspects of Christmas; gift giving, commercialism, drinking and being merry. Many of us thank God/Jesus and think warm thoughts about a babe in a manger with straw, animals and shepherds gathering round, the magi, a star. Jackson is saying, whatever he may be to you, Jesus, is not for the hypocritical, who take him out of mothballs every December and put him back in his box a month later. Jackson is saying that he is not a believer in Jesus as Savior, but that does not mean that the words...

Many of us (Christians, Heathens, Pagans, Atheists) celebrate the cultural aspects of Christmas; gift giving, commercialism, drinking and being merry. Many of us thank God/Jesus and think warm thoughts about a babe in a manger with straw, animals and shepherds gathering round, the magi, a star. Jackson is saying, whatever he may be to you, Jesus, is not for the hypocritical, who take him out of mothballs every December and put him back in his box a month later. Jackson is saying that he is not a believer in Jesus as Savior, but that does not mean that the words and actions of Jesus, who comingled and intentionally connected with the outcasts, the sick, the Samaritans; the marginalized should be forgotten and ignored. For all that Jesus was, is and represents, the few that try to live as He lived are condemned by the rest of us, as He was condemned for interfering in the business of the Sadducees.