Make it a great day

You will never understand
how it feels to live your life
with no meaning or control,
and with no place left to go...

"Common Peolple," by Pulp

...and if you do, you're one of us.

The thing about control is, you take it.

The thing about meaning is, you make it.

One Toronto punk band of the early 1980's sang,

live your life or have it lived for you;
live your life or have nothing to look forward to

Wish I could remember whether this was Youth, Youth, Youth, or Zeroption,
or Chronic Submission, or Young Lions.... nope, can't recall

Strummerfest believes in the empowerment of every individual to make his or her life meaningful.  We believe that everyone should be encouraged to cast aside controls that harden them into fixed limitations on their creativity and personal control. 

Of course, that doesn't mean, "no rules".  The slogan, "no rules," is, as a friend of ours would say, "for the weak."  Or, as John Wayne once said,

a man's got to have a code, a creed to live by...

Having a code, a creed, rules -- a set of standard things you know (or believe, or hope) to be right and true, and then live by -- that is one of the keys to controlling your life and living it meaningfully.  If we are ever to contribute to life, we have to draw lines, we have to dismiss what's harmful, unwholesome, unethical, and embrace what we know or believe to be good, stand by it like the most loyal of friends, speak it in public, and live it at all times.

Another friend of ours, now long passed on, used to always say, "Make it a great day."  That -- what we've just said -- is a significant part of how that is done.  We can't make anything great -- not even a single day -- till we make decisions that are fundamental. about who we're going to be in the world.

So Strummerfest invites everyone to take that bull by the horns, to embrace your life's meaning by making it, to experience your control by taking it, and to contribute every bit of good you can to the world that surrounds you.  We like to think that's sort of what Strummer meant (in part, at least) when he defined punk this way:

I go straight in, see what's wrong and I fix it.  ...That is a punk attitude

...My motto is  'never take your eye off the ball,' ...I like to be completely aware of what's going on at all times...  There's no long wait 'cause  I've already clocked it while everyone's going (jabbering) meh-meh-meh.  I'm going meh-meh-meh too but I know what's going on around me.  This is punk rock.

In fact, punk rock means EXEMPLARY MANNERS TO YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEING... [not what people] thought it was twenty years ago.