This old world's in a hell of a fix

I'm not familiar with Canadian singer/songwriter Bruce Cockburn, but maybe I need to check him out. Tom sends an email with the lyrics to one of Bruce's songs and a speech he made to a graduating class at St. Thomas University in 1999.

If I had a rocket launcher

Here comes the helicopter -- second time today
Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away
How many kids they've murdered only God can say
If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay

I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate
I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states
And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate
If I had a rocket launcher...I would retaliate

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait
To fall down from starvation -- or some less humane fate
Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate
If I had a rocket launcher...I would not hesitate

I want to raise every voice -- at least I've got to try
Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.
Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry
If I had a rocket launcher...Some son of a bitch would die

The song was written from Bruce's experience visiting Guatemalan refugee camps in Mexico in the mid-80s. It could answer for too many people in too many places year after year, decade after decade.

Convocation Speech at St. Thomas University - excerpts

There was a very popular traveling preacher back in the 20s in the southern US. He recorded a sermon hich had as its refrain, "This old world's in a hell-of-a fix." …..

One attitude of mine, which has not been transformed, over the years, except perhaps to be deepened some, is a certain skepticism concerning human institutions. We are a social creature, but how we manage to complicate life with our attempts at establishing the perfect social structure!

We set up institutions to free us - systems of worship, government, business - but somehow these institutions always seem to come to be about power. We give them a little and they want more. Churches and governments and armies and police and corporate boards of directors all have their legitimate and necessary rules, but it doesn't take much of a shove to tip the balance from social order to New World Order.

One of the important attributes of institutional power is that it wants to get bigger - to draw more power unto itself. This is a kind of metaphysical property which has only partly to do with careers and profits, though it's often manifested around those things. It seems to be a force of nature, like inertia or gravity.

This old world's in a hell-of-a fix…..

Sometimes I look around and I feel like we're on an elevator falling faster and faster, propelled by that particular gravity. Everything wants to eat everything else.

People in uniform do the bidding of governments acting in the interest of transnational business disguised as somebody's religious imperative. I have personal friends in all these camps and I'm continually mystified at how someone can be a person of sensibility, of conscious even, and still be able to play ball with this system.

Globalization is the buzzword of the day. The shift of political power from nation states, which, however distorted the connection, are about community, to corporate entities answerable only to their boards of directors, is in full swing. Picture a big fat fist closing around the world, saying its bringing order and benefits to all. But instead of creating a true and useful order, what squeezes out between the tightening fingers in chaos-the entropic assertion of tribal distinctness, exploited for the benefit of a tiny minority-ethnic cleansing, a vicious little low intensity conflict here, food riots there, somebody's rights trampled one place, somebody's children slaughtering their peers somewhere else, bankers and investors doing end runs around the law….

We've only barely started to see the effects of environmental degradation-hormone disruptor, ozone depletion, desertification, the shrinking supply of safe water.

This old world's in a hell-of-a fix and we have to deal with it, you and me, but mainly you because I'll likely be out of here before we really hit bottom.

I look around at the amazing beauty, the incredible balance of the world God made us part of, and I see how it's getting trashed and I want to cry out at somebody: STOP KILLING MY WORLD! YOU'RE KILLING MY WORLD AND YOU'RE MAKING ME HATE AND I HATE YOU FOR MAKING ME HATE... but I don't say these things, who do I say them to?
...
What are they thinking when they curry the favour of a murdering 3rd World despot because we supposedly want his business?…Business that consists of exploiting his cheap labour force, kept affordable by violence, and so depriving our own working people of jobs. And when some of us protest this unconsciousable toadying what does our government do? It calls out the forces of "law and order" to suppress this dissent - nothing must interfere with the flow of so-called trade.
...
This old world is in a hell-of-a-fix and we have to fix it. Soon. We'll never fix all of it, so don't be disappointed, but we can sure make it better than it is. To do that we need to identify the problems. And we need to have some idea of where we stand in relation to these problems.

It's no good slipping into an us-and-them way of thinking. That's what leads to wars ... And what allows a person to let their greed run away with them at the expense of those around them.

There's no us-and-them. There's only us.