Little round planet in a big universe, sometimes it looks blessed,
sometimes it looks cursed.
Depends on what you look at obviously,
but even more
it depends on the way that you see.
Bruce Cockburn
People See Through You
You've got covert action
Prejudice to extremes
You've got primitive cunning
And high tech means
You've got eyes everywhere
But people see through you
You've got good manipulators
Got your store of dupes
You've got the idiot clamour
Of your lobby groups
You like to play on fears
But people see through you
You've got instant communication
Instant data tabulation
You got the forces of occupation
But you don't get capitulation
Cause people see through you
You've got the sounding brass
You've got the triumph of the will
You do what you want to
And we pay the bills
you hype the need for sacrifice
but people see through you
You've got anti-matter language
Contrived to conceal
You've been lying so long
You don't know what's real
You're a figment of your own imagination
And people see through you
You've got lip service tributaries
You've got death fetish mercenaries
You hold the tickets to the cemeteries
You're big and bad and scary
But people see through you
When you're lovers in a dangerous time, sometimes you're made to feel
as if your love's a crime.
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight; got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.
THE TROUBLE WITH NORMAL
Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage
Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage
Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights
What did they think the politics of panic would invite?
Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the Third World trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local Third World's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all get back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When the ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse.
We're the insect life of Paradise: crawl across leaf
or among towering blades of grass -
glimpse only sometimes
the amazing breadth of heaven
You're as loved as you were
before the strangeness swept through our bodies,
our houses, our streets -
when we could speak without codes
and light swirled around,
like wind blown petals...
