Born in 1959...the very best of times
Gas was cheap...cars were big
*** The American Dream ***
only...we called some people "nig"
A day in November we'll all remember
Cheerin' and wavin'
so shiny & clean
then nothin' but dread
Camolet shattered
it's young king dead
With determination we tried to go on
Yet everyone questioned Vietnam
Young people declared a new generation
They challenged everything that defined our nation
A great man said "let freedom ring"
Then they silenced Martin Luther King
The Woodstock nation was high 'n' dancin'
And up rose monsters like Charles Manson
We started to see the impact of pollution
We banded together to find a solution
We started to hope for a new beginning
Then they got Bobby in the ninth inning
The sixties ended none-too-soon
But not before we walked the moon
Jimi and Janis were left behind
The whole world had been re-defined
The seventies brought an open book
Then Nixon said "I'm not a crook"
Our lives began to reach a calm
As we finally got out of Vietnam
Maybe we could make a brand-new start
We even manufactured a human heart
We hid from reality in Hollywood
The Godfather, Star Wars, E.T...it was all so good
We wanted to smile and bury the pain
So we lost ourselves in a pile of cocaine
We tanned ourselves in tubs of crisco
Danced all night to the pulse of disco
Looked like the end of Rock'n'roll'A
We learned to hate the Ayatollah
Then Ronald Regan and the rollin' Eighties
Along came AIDS and test-tube babies
The Challenger rose and we watched it fall
The Cold War ended at the Berlin Wall
The decline of our ingenuity...the failure began
Everything now read "Made in Japan"
Then Another war had to be explained
We had to evict Saddam Hussein
The 90's seemed a good place to be
Everything was changed by the PC
The decade saw a revolution not soon to forget
We were all connected on the Internet
The decade ended with a "Hooray"
We actually made it through "Y2K"
Not much later we plunged into hell
Where were you when the towers fell?
Here we are in 2003
Not much left of the economy
Things are bad and the country is sad
"time for a war"...so we took Baghdad
I've lived through tumultuous history
Why so much death is a plain mystery
How did we dig ourselves into this hole?
I think it all started at a simple grassy knoll
- Larry Savage -
April 2003
