What's Going On - Intelligent People Assume Nothing

Marvin Gaye

Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On (Civil Rights Footage and Lyrics)

Released May 1971

What’s going on here today reminds me of the early seventies. I keep coming back to that thought. Different faces, different issues, but the same feeling in the air. A country that can’t hear itself think.

Back then, one song caught that feeling better than any speech. Marvin Gaye put it out in 1971. He called it What’s Going On. If you were around, you remember where you were the first time you heard it. If you weren’t, go find it today and listen all the way through.

The song had a hard road getting out the door. Marvin was Motown’s smooth love-song man. The label wanted more of that. When he brought them a record about war and police and young people being beaten in the street, the boss did not want to release it. Marvin dug in. He would not record anything else until it came out.

It came out anyway. And the people took it straight to the top of the charts. The folks at the top thought the country did not want to hear it. The country proved them wrong.

The song started with a man named Obie Benson. He was on the road with his group and saw police wade into young antiwar protesters out in Berkeley, California. He could not shake what he saw. He kept asking himself what was going on. He took that question to Marvin, and they built the song around it.

Marvin had his own reason to care. His brother had come home from Vietnam with stories. The song is sung from the place of a man who came home and found his own country fighting itself.

where we were in those years.

In 1970, Ohio National Guard troops fired on students at Kent State. Four young people died on a college lawn. Soldiers from their own state did it. That was the moment a lot of Americans stopped believing it could not happen here.

In 1971, the Pentagon Papers came out. They showed the government had been telling the people one thing about Vietnam while knowing another. The administration went to court to stop the papers from printing it. The Supreme Court said no. The press could publish.

In 1972, some men broke into an office at the Watergate building. It looked like a small burglary. It turned out to be a thread that unraveled a presidency.

So look at today. Troops sent into American cities. Courts having to step in and stop deployments. Soldiers reminded what an illegal order is. Officials who seem to think the rules are for other people. Families who cannot talk at the supper table without a fight.

I am not saying it is the same. History does not repeat like a record on a loop. But it rhymes. And right now it rhymes with 1971 loud enough that I can hear it.

Look at the title. What’s Going On. There is no question mark on it. There never was. Some say that was on purpose. It is a question, but it is said flat, like a man who already knows the answer is bad and is asking you to look at it with him.

Marvin did not scream at anybody on that record. He did not call names. He did not tell you who to hate. He asked. Over and over, in that soft voice of his, he asked people to look at what was happening and talk to each other about it.

That is a different kind of fight. It does not need a crowd. It does not need a slogan. It only needs one person who will not look away and keeps asking the question out loud.

A question is hard to argue with. You can shout down an accusation. You can call a slogan propaganda. But when somebody looks you in the eye and asks what is going on here, you have to either answer or show that you can’t.

That is what held the country together the last time. People asked. Reporters asked, and printed what they found. Judges asked, and ruled. A few men in Congress asked, out loud, on television, what the president knew and when he knew it. The asking did not stop until the truth came out.

It was not fast. It was not pretty. It took years. But the rails held because enough people kept asking and would not let the question drop.

We need that again. Not more shouting. We have plenty of shouting. What we are short on is people who will ask the plain question and wait for the answer.

What is going on with our soldiers in our streets? What is going on with the courts being ignored? What is going on with the money? What is going on with the truth we are being told, and the truth we are not?

Ask it at the town hall. Ask it in a letter to your representative. Ask it in the comment section, without the name-calling. Ask it of the news you read, and of the people who wrote it. Ask it of the machines too, the AI tools a lot of us use now. Make them show their work. Do not take a smooth answer because it sounds good.

And when you get an answer, check it. Then ask again.

Marvin’s record came out in a dark year. It did not fix anything by itself. Songs do not do that. But it gave a lot of people permission to stop pretending things were fine. It made the question something you could say out loud without being called a radical.

That is what I want for you today. Permission to say it out loud. Something is going on. You can feel it. You are not crazy for feeling it. And you do not have to scream to be heard.

Go put that record on this morning. Listen to the man ask. Then go ask it yourself, in your own voice, to whoever needs to hear it.

What’s going on. Say it flat. Say it steady. Keep saying it until somebody answers.

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This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.

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