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12/25/2004:

""Work for Peace""

Gil Scott-Heron wrote “Work for Peace” in response to Desert Storm in 1991. Praying for peace is not enough. Feliz Navidad.

Back when Eisenhower was president
Golf courses were where most of his time was spent.
So I never paid much attention to what the President said
Because in general, I believed the President was politically dead,
But he always seemed to know how the muscles were going to be flexed:
He kept mumbling something about a military-industrial complex.

The military and monetary

The military and the monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary
They have turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
They are turning the planet into a cemetery.

The military and the monetary
Use the media as intermediaries.
They are determined to keep the citizens secondary
They make so many decisions that seem arbitrary.

We’ve been standing behind the ‘Commander-in-Chief’
Who was under a spotlight, shaking like a leaf
Because the ship of state had landed on an economic reef
So we knew he’d be bringing us messages of grief.

The military and the monetary
Were ‘Shielded’ by January and went ‘Storming’ into February.
They brought us pot-bellied generals as luminaries.
Two weeks ago I hadn’t heard of the sons of bitches
And then all of a sudden they were legendary.

They took the honor from the honorary
They took the dignitary from the dignitaries
They took the secrets from the secretaries,
But they left the ‘bitch’ in ‘obituary.’

Yeah they had some smart bombs,
But they had some dumb ones as well,
Scared the hell outta CNN in that Baghdad Hotel.

The military and the monetary

The military and monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary,
War in the desert sure could seem scary
But they beamed out the war to all of their subsidiaries
Tried making ‘so damn insane’ a worthy adversary.

Keeping all the citizens secondary
Scaring old folks into coronaries
Making us wonder if all of this was really, truly necessary.

We’ve got to work for peace.
We’ve got to work for peace.
If we all believed in peace we would have peace.
The only thing wrong with peace
Is that you can’t make no money from it.

The military and the monetary
Get together whenever they think it’s necessary
They have turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries
They are turning parts of the planet into a cemetery.

We hounded the Ayatollah religiously
Bombed Libya and killed Qadafi’s son hideously.
We turned our backs on our allies, the Panamanians
Watched Ollie North sell guns to the Iranians
Witnessed Gorbachev slaughtering Lithuanians
So we better warn the Amish, they may bomb the Pennsylvanians.

We’ve got to work for peace.
Peace ain’t coming this way.
We’ve got to work for peace.

Peace is not merely the absence of war,
It is the absence of the rumors of war and the threats of war
And the preparation for war.
Peace is not merely the absence of war
We will have all touched the power of peace within ourselves.
Because we will have all come to peace within our selves.

Peace ain’t gonna be easy.
Peace ain’t gonna be free.
We’ve got to work for peace.

from the album Spirits’ (1994)