"OK" Official Music Video
On October 10th, 2023, the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, made a powerful speech, decrying the celebrations of Hamas massacres across New York City. His words of conscience “We Are Not Alright” begin my new song and music video “OK,” which addresses the barbaric Hamas October 7 attacks in Israel, and the global fallout that resulted. Such is the theme of this song. In short, “We Are Not OK.” We Are Not OK as a nation when certain members of Congress refuse to condemn terrorists who kidnap and decapitate babies. We Are Not OK as a world when the United Nations General Assembly rejects a motion to condemn Hamas and U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres seeks to “contextualize” the terrorism and atrocities of October 7th. We Are Not OK when legacy women’s rights groups and global organizations supposedly devoted to women’s human rights have little to no comment after grandmothers, women, and young girls are raped, tortured, and murdered. We Are Not OK when concertgoers celebrating in the desert are raped, massacred, and kidnapped at a festival for peace – and the majority response from music industry executives, artists, and Hollywood are lawyered statements loaded with cowardly apathy. We Are Not OK when our flagship universities become harbors for gross antisemitism and radicalization, headed by presidents, boards, and faculty steeped in moral and intellectual corruption, who lack the spine to simply declare right from wrong. We Are Not OK when leading media platforms seem more focused on creating narratives of moral equivalency between the actions of Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas, rather than denouncing the barbarity and terrorism on Oct 7th and ignoring Palestinian innocents being used as human shields in hospitals and schools, built over terrorist tunnels, funded by international aid. And on and on… Clearly, the causes of the moral rot on our campuses, in our culture, and institutions have been growing and metastasizing for decades. An inability to clearly call out the horrors of Hamas’ terrorist atrocities is not the root of the problem; it is the symptom of a deeper decay. We can look away no longer. Evil is on the march and wears many faces. Afghanistan’s Taliban, Putin’s Russia, Iran’s Khamenei, his Palestinian “champions” in Hamas and Hezbollah, are all part of the same ominous movement. Xi Jinping’s commitment to “reunify” Taiwan likely the next domino to fall. Thankfully, as happens in the darkest of times, there are heroes in our midst. Some are in this video, several have names that we know, others will never be known. Like my recent songs “Blood on My Hands”, which was critical of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and “Can One Man Save the World,” which we recorded in Kyiv in support of Ukraine, in my mind “OK” is not a political message, but a moral one. A call to action. The final image of the “OK” music video is Martin Luther King and his historic call to every man and woman on this earth: “He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.” This is a time for choosing. We Are Not OK
