When the Earth Rotates, It's Another Day

I wouldn't consider myself ill-informed about the world, but I'm often surprised by events that fly beneath my radar. Case in point - the dislocation of millions of Chinese citizens due to the construction of a mega dam that will flood the Yangtze River. This happening is well-documented in Up the Yangtze (a Q&A with filmmaker Yung Chang offers good detail on the production and its subjects). The title of this post is a lyric from a karaoke ballad that appears in the film. Its banality made me laugh, but its meaning relative to the view of the dam as a symbol of China's economic advancement isn't funny. Near the end of the movie, a time-lapse sequence of the river rising startles in spite of its inevitability. Never mind that lives are being permanently disrupted, change is a part of progress. So the song says.