While Our Beds Are Burning
Reason, Trauma, and the Second Religiousness of Our Time
This essay is a bit different, but the song I’m writing about really gave me the feels and I rushed this together… hope you like it!
The Sound That Stopped Me
I was standing in Whole Foods when I heard it.
The air hummed with the usual background sounds—refrigerators, conversation, the checkout scanners—and then a guitar riff cut through all of it. Sharp. Urgent. Familiar.
Beds Are Burning.
Midnight Oil, 1987. I hadn’t thought about that song in years. But suddenly, there it was—pulsing through the speakers, uninvited, and electric. The energy in it felt out of place, almost violent against the calm of the store. It was as if the sound itself had remembered something the rest of us were trying to forget.
Later that night, I looked it up. A protest anthem for Australia’s displaced Indigenous people, written to confront the theft of land and the moral amnesia that followed. But what I felt wasn’t nostalgia, or even political sympathy. It was something deeper, older—the vibration of truth spoken through rhythm, the feeling of conscience breaking through the noise, the anger transmuted into motion, still alive inside the art
The time has come / to say fair’s fair / to pay the rent / to pay our share.
It’s about land, yes—but I couldn’t shake the sense that it was about something else too.
It felt like the whole world had been sleeping in the same bed, pretending not to notice the smoke.
