Larkin High School Spring Musical "Annie," April 25, 2009 (Pit Orchestra Transition Music), Act I.
In an amazingly exact parallel to the modern day, likely lost upon most of the young cast, crew, and much of the audience no longer taught American history in the past several years, the play makes fun of a president blamed for a depression that struck like 9/11 shortly into his presidency (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_..., in spite of his promoting policies of cooperation, proper regulation, and volunteerism (see, for comparison, video of real, more recent history -- the response to more modern, futile efforts of reform at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxMInS... which resulted in the present collapse of our banking system). These American values embodied in cooperation, proper regulation, and volunteerism, learned the hard way by the "greatest generation," or, The People, metaphorically embodied in the unbeatable, optimistic character of the orphaned "Annie," turned out to be the very things which eventually would enable The People of our great nation to save the world from tyranny in WWII, take us to the moon, and build the prosperity we enjoyed for the latter half of the 20th Century. On the other hand, the play builds what it lampoons as bumbling but lovable hero out of the empty rhetoric of the successor president (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D ._Roosevelt), whose real-life elitism and proposed changes in the balance of government powers damaged and could have nearly crippled our constitution and its emphasis on human rights and personal liberty, whose posturing policies and expansion of government only deepened and prolonged the Depression he blamed upon his predecessor, until it took a World War and The People of the greatest generation to finally end that Depression. To those who don't wish to repeat it, the play should cause us all as Americans to learn and ponder the lessons of history, so we do not doom ourselves to repeat another 12-year, "New Deal" depression, then having to go through another repetition of almost four years of World War with its hundreds of millions of deaths world-wide to pull us out of it.... Such is the price of ignorance, and such is the power of the arts, to educate and enlighten, in the modern age...