Songfacts®:

• Johnson said of this song: "I had a few of the lines for it here and there. But what really inspired me to write the rest of it was an interview with Kurt Vonnegut I read where he was asked if he felt that the leaders of today - cultural, political, and artistic - were being responsible to their society. And he had this line that I thought was great where he said, 'Forget about society. What about humanity in general?' And so that was the idea for the song. The first line is, 'By now we should know how to communicate instead of coming to blows.' It just seems that in this day and age with email and telephones, it's crazy how we still have wars. It seems that everything should be able to be worked out through a conversation by now, if there's just a little bit of compassion on every side."