Distant Sense of Random Menace

Maybe it’s too complicated, maybe it’s a minefield

Maybe it’s like someone else’s problem it’s not quite real

Buried page 10 of today’s paper

Read about another road rage of a crazed teenager

The mother gives the vox grab saying she’s just

sad, and all the justice in the world won’t bring her daughter back

flavour of the 48 hours til the news finds another

utter tragedy to increase the views

And you still never know if you’ve reached the truth

30 seconds to a minute and you’re in it up to the tips of your toes

and hey the truth is a deceptive uncle

Media moguls and leaders act like Simon & Garfunkle

The, right wing squarks for yet more hawks

And the, left wing calls for yet more peace talks

And many people left are asking who to believe

Cos reality is as muddy as token olive leaves

And apparently you can’t wear your heart on your sleeve

Cos the menace is too distant for listeners to grieve

And even umm, I’ve been numbed til the cartoon alternative

Still trying to learn to live

Kigali

It’s just a distant sense of random menace

Bosnia

It’s just a distant sense of random menace

Gaza Strip

It’s just a distant sense of random menace

…

Try as I might I cannot get my head around the

Hutus slaughtering the Tutsis in Rwanda one-nine-nine

-four, and then on top to comprehend how the United

Nations let it happen with their blue helmets armed by the door

Eight hundred thousand in less than

Ninety days, is Africa just too far away

Or is the genocide convention only mentioned in connection

With the Nazis and the Jews during World War Two

Cos your world views seen through the same few that drew

Their bloody colonial maps for custodial taxes

Historical pacts, treaties and age-old arrangements ignore

In order for the dominant order to be restored

Warlords, dictators, puppet regimes installed

While cold wars and old walls did fall

Wars on drugs, wars on terror later on there’ll be

concessions made by governments of intelligence errors

Is to understand to simplify? Black and white, good

and bad, learn not to sympathise unless it’s of an allied flag

I’ll be damned if my land is the fifty-first state

Both a realist and idealist on the same day

It’s not a soapbox, or at least I hope not

These are things that affect me so much they’re what I dream of

Dream of different endings where lessons are learnt

Before good and bad were copyright foreign policy terms

Before hip hop was either barbeque or bling

Before it seemed like everyone was operated by string

So align yourself, define yourself, design yourself,

With any luck your life will all work out

And you won’t find yourself the victim of an effort to ethnically

Cleanse, left to defend the rest of these men, women

& children, from rape, pillage and killing cos

every evil got it’s coalition of the goddamn willing

so forgive me if I can’t give you something to laugh to

this is for you to argue, shake your mind and arse to,

it’s for me to ask you just who can you trust

dust to dust, and if tomorrow is us? What if…