Crossing the street…or CROSSING THE LINE?!?!

Dear Paul, Ringo, John and The Other Guy,

I was driving my children to swimming lessons yesterday and your song “All You Need Is Love” came on the radio.  I had never really listened to the words in this song, but as a concerned parent, I decided to try to listen to the words that my children were hearing.  What I heard was truly shocking!  I find the message in this song to be deeply troubling and, as a concerned parent, I beg you to do what you can to stop radio stations from playing this song.

I’m sure that you thought that you were just writing another silly love song and, I mean, what’s wrong with that?  But, if you really think about the message in the song, I think you’ll come to understand why it disturbed me so much.  Imagine for a second, that an impressionable child heard this song and took it seriously.  Clearly, human beings need a good deal more than love to survive.  They need food, shelter, clothes (preferably from a decent designer), and air.  What if an impressionable child heard this song and decided to stop eating completely?  His concerned parents would beg him to eat but he would not.  What if, as he widdled away to the size of a twig, slowly starving to death and his concerned parents, now grief-stricken, asked him why he was doing this and he replied “Because the Beatles told me all I need is love”?  Could you live with your selves?

What if, even worse, he just decided to stop breathing? He could die within a moment or two giving the concerned parents only a few seconds to react.  What if his friends saw him stop breathing and thought that it was the “cool” thing to do?  What if hundreds, thousands of children stopped breathing just to not be “square”?  It could be an epidemic of epidemic proportions! Children, falling over dead in classrooms across America, with the words “All You Need Is Love” passing though their blue lips as they meet their maker.  Is that what you want?

Music has a major effect on the ideas of young people.  Do you know what Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler, and Ted Bundy have in common?  As young men, they all listened to music.  And look what suffering they caused!

I demand that you stop allowing this song to be played on radio stations everywhere.  I also ask that you never fill our children’s souls with such blasphemous, anti-social ideas by playing this live.  Until you agree to stop this madness, I and a group of like-minded concerned parents, plan to boycott love.  We will not express love in words or actions.  We even plan on starting all tennis games at 15 so that no person ever has love.

Yours truly,

A Concerned Parent