Stage 1: When I was a child, I spoke as a child, and what impressed me most about Minor Threat‘s seminal 1981 track “In My Eyes” was how these Strait-Edge rockers seemed to advocate the Word of Wisdom: “You tell me you like the taste/You just need an excuse/You tell me it calms your nerves/You just think it looks cool,” a young Ian MacKaye belts out with withering contempt. For a young LDS teen myself struggling to look cool myself (back when that sort of thing seemed to really matter), Minor Threat gave me permission to not drink as a matter of Punk Rock purity and hardcore principle, rather than the decidedly less-Punk motive of mere religious obedience.

Besides, as everyone knows, nothing is cooler than not trying to to be cool; and so Minor Threat, an early-’80s Punk Band with zero chance at going mainstream yet not caring anyways, seemed to me to be the very epitome of cool. They also made me feel more comfortable with not belonging to a mainstream religion myself.

Stage 2: When I was a Young Single Adult, concerns about “coolness” mattered comparatively less, so what now most stood out to me about “In My Eyes” was the second verse, wherein MacKaye belts out, “You tell me that you like her/You just wish you did.” In a high-pressure religion such as ours that places such a premium on marrying young, it is easier than we care to admit, for us to fall into a relationship with someone we are not actually all that attracted to, but date anyways, because we like the idea of being in a committed relationship, because we’re supposed to like the idea of being in a relationship.

But that fallacy was obvious even to a teenaged Ian MacKaye, who served as a crucial reminder to me that it is unfair to the girl and yourself to date someone only because you wish you liked them.

Stage 3: Nowadays however, what stands out to me most about the song is the line that immediately follows it: “You tell me that I make no difference/At least I’m f*ckin’ trying/What the f*ck have you done?”

Because these days it feels like we make so little difference, doesn’t it? The corrupt are elected, climate change denialists win high office while the world literally burns, the love of many waxes cold, “we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.” Our co-congregants get more worked up about swearing than the plight of refugees and children kidnapped at the border, as though Joseph Smith himself hadn’t said, “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm yet deals justice to his neighbors and mercifully deals his substance to the poor.” We organize mass-marches and sign petitions, we vote and put up yard signs and donate to campaigns, we sing our protest songs and write our essays and share our posts, and scarcely any of it seems to make even a dent. We begin to feel like Com in the Book of Ether, in the days when the “there began to be robbers in the land; and they adopted the old plans, and administered oaths after the manner of the ancients, and sought again to destroy the kingdom. Now Com did fight against them much; nevertheless, he did not prevail against them” (Ether 10:33-34).

Yet implicit in that scripture is the assurance that Com was still right to fight, and that we aren’t let off the hook either. “It is by grace we are saved after all we can do,” reads that same self-same Book of Mormon; shoot, Moroni himself writes “whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world, yea, even a place at the right hand of God, which hope cometh of faith, maketh an anchor to the souls of men, which would make them sure and steadfast, always abounding in good works, being led to glorify God.” That implies we keep trying, even if all hope seems gone. Cynicism and pessimism accomplishes nothing. As George Bernard Shaw famously once wrote, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Minor Threat evidently believed the same.

So now the same song that helped me in my teens and young adulthood helps me now, reminding me of the energy I need to bring with me going forward.