We Didn T Start The Fire Analysis

Society has been shaped by a large amount of influences upon it. Our culture has drastically changed in many ways from events and Billy Joel’s wildly popular “We Didn’t Start the Fire” brings many of these events to light. The song’s events started when he was born, in 1949, and ends the year he published the song in 1989. Among these events were the “hypodermics on the shore”, “China under martial law”, and the “rock and roller cola wars”. These events took place in the late 1980’s, near the end of the song. The first topic on the list is “hypodermics on the shore”, also referred to as the Syringe Tide which was a large pollution spill along the Jersey shore in 1987 and 1988. The waste consisted of a large amount of hypodermic needles, and it closed New Jersey beaches in a 50 mile radius (“Sewage”, par. 2, 8). The New Jersey shore vacation industry was directly affected by this mass of pollution. The $-11-billion industry was threatened as a result of these closings and it raised many health concerns in the area (par. 4). The medical waste was found to be illegally dumped at sea after many thought the cause was the sewage system (par. 8). Before this incident, waste dumped in the oceans was often an overlooked affair. It has been considered as one of the most crucial turning points in popular opinion on environmentalism.
A large amount of students and workers in the upwards of hundreds of thousands defied the imposition of martial law and staged hunger strikes and massive pro-democracy protests in the heart of China’s capital, Beijing (“Chinese”, par. 1). This was commonly referred to as the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 or the June Fourth Incident, as it took place on June 4th. The Communist Party in China decreed that anyone posing as a political adversary would be treated as a foreign enemy, and used lethal force. A large portion of the protestors were massacred at the protests (“Chinese”, par.