https://youtu.be/oDDFPWmUTHk

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

No raise, no money, no overtime.
This pride ain’t built on a production line.
Your cars, your drinks, your parking fines
keep us down in the welfare line.
We scream, we cry, we love and die.
All for a crumb from the social pie.
But who are we to want something more.
Just churn our bones for the election war.
Like mice to cheese, dogs to cats
they put us in line with those ice cold drafts.
Flood our brains with pain and fear
until they got us kneeling there.
When the lights go on and they all go home
then we get water and maybe thrown a bone.
But be quiet for now or else they’ll hear.
You, in the basement, making it clear.
Telling the truth has never been smart.
Why, you ask, where do we start?
Gandhi and Lennon we say it for certain.
Kennedy and Martin, the world was hurtin’
Malcolm was changing, they couldn’t have that.
But that’s not where it started, we’d have to go back.
Let’s start with the Lakota, they loved their land.
Forced to surrender so much to the white man.
The black hills were theirs to love and to live.
But once they found gold, they were ordered to give.
The world was changing but not the sins
because if they gave up, they had to give in.
Poor Sitting Bull, great fighter in the west.
He resisted and received a shot to the chest.
And so it goes my friend, it remains to be seen.
It’s not what they show, but rather in between.
For those are the truths as known to be.
Just remember the massacre at Wounded Knee.
Next time they try to bandaid with your dollar raise.
They stick you in a chapel to worship and praise.
They guilt you into schooling or better yet, a job.
Remember, it’s your house they’re sitting in.
It’s you they plan to rob.