O' the bravery and the cowardice!
The coolness and the passion,
Modernity and primitive,
When killing to stop killing?

What civil rights and liberties we paid for
With blood and lost futures,
The patriots and the marchers won,
Were quietly surrendered in one night of fear?

Is the full expression of exclusion,
Of waste living besides want,
The unraveling fiction of borders,
Exploding jet fuel and two towers falling?

When one hand knows not what the other has wrought;
US biggest military-economic machine of the world,
But we vote for name recognition, 'domestic policy only' at best
Deciding politicians who never heard of these countries.

By the people, for the people AND our foreign policy?
We the world's biggest cart without a driver.
Aggressive corporations plus a few special interests
Are the only ones balancing the Pentagon's grip on the wheel.


For decades in NY softhearted liberals made it hard to fight crime.
The people got fed up with fear there,
And gave Mayor Guliani carte blanche.
Floodlights, police brutality, then Manhattan like Disney.

New York, symbol, microcosm,
Playground for all peoples,
"Our markets admired the world over,"
Humans from every nation pulverized together.

Hours of that image, buildings standing and falling,
Every shortwave station like crickets chirping at sunset,
Sorting through their feelings, feeling their wounds,
Where not long ago our wheels rode over their back.


Eating lunch with Christians in Syria,
Their TV shows a different image;
Heroic music, waves of brave youths throwing stones,
At faceless Israelis, American weapons, colonizers, assassins.

This Christian family, in a Muslim village, under Assad's dictatorship
Next to a crusader fort, knights & horses - a modern miniseries,
Said "What we need is another man like Salah-Deen,"
To drive out the invaders.

Here and there, connecting pain when people kill the unfamiliar:
Never any justice when one body destroys another,
Cartoon enemies, axis of evil, preemptive stikes,
Fear's fools we give our warlords control without consience.

Lets evolve together, get interested, risk it all.
Tear down the walls that protect US and leave others outside.
If we don't, like the Earth's water, it will all find a balance,
Like air-cabin pressure, one hole will tear the roof off.