Exist

(album: The Stage - 2016)

[M. Shadows:]
Our truth is painted across the sky
In our reflection, we learn to fly
No hand to hold us
No one to save us from tomorrow

Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
No light to follow
A shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens
I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?

Think for a moment of all the lives
Stripped of their essence before their time
We stand to conquer
But is there nothing left tomorrow?

I'm sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
There's no light to follow
A shot in the dark
Does anybody know?
Sailing away, beyond the reach of anyone
Far beyond the dreams of everyone
High from the heavens
I can't see the pain
Does anybody care?

[Neil deGrasse Tyson:]
We have one collective hope: The Earth
And yet uncounted people remain hopeless
Famine and calamity abound
Sufferers hurl themselves into the arms of war
People kill and get killed in the name of someone else's concept of God
Dare we admit that our thoughts and behaviors spring from a belief that the world revolves around us?
Each fabricated conflict, self-murdering bomb, vanished airplane
Every fictionalized dictator, biased partisan and wayward son
Are part of the curtains of society's racial, ethnic, religious, national and cultural conflicts
And you find the human ego turning the knobs and pulling the levers
When I track the orbits of asteroids, comets, and planets
Each one a pirouetting dancer in a cosmic ballet, choreographed by the forces of gravity
I see beyond the plight of humans. I see a universe ever-expanding
With its galaxies embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time
However big our world is — in our hearts, our minds, in our out-sized atlases?
The universe is even bigger
There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the world's beaches
More stars in the universe than seconds of time that have passed since Earth formed
More stars than words and sounds ever uttered by all humans who have ever lived
The day we cease the exploration of the cosmos is the day we threaten the continuance of our species
In that bleak world, arms-bearing, resource-hungry people and nations
Would be prone to act on their low contracted prejudices
And would have seen the last gasp of human enlightenment —
Until the rise of a visionary new culture that once again embraces the cosmic perspective
A perspective in which we are one, fitting neither above, nor below, but within