The Great Wall

(album: Bedtime For Democracy - 1986)

Great Wall of China
It's so big it's seen from outer space
Put there to keep starving neighbors
Locked outside the gates

What's changed today?
Empires hoard more than they need
And peasants threaten our comfort

We'll build a Great Wall around our power
Build a Great Wall around our power

Bankrupt L.A.'s streetcar line
So people pay more to drive
Plant strategic freeways
To divide neighborhoods by color lines

We'd rather pay for riot squads
Than pump your ghetto back to life
We let your schools decay on purpose

To build a Great Wall around our power
Another Great Wall around our power

Warlords in grey suits
Take a different route to work each day
Second-hand green berets
Form the companies' private armies.
We'll take all your gold
But won't teach reading or feed your poor
The League of Gentleman
Would rather feed guns to puppet dictators

There's too many people in your world
And refugees are expensive
When they trickled down onto our soil
We hunt them and arrest them
Classify them insane
And put them back on the next plane
To the waiting arms
Of the same death squads they fled

We've built a Great Wall around our power
Economic Great Wall around our power
Worldwide Great Wall around our power

Give us your poor,
Your tired and your weak
We'll send 'em right back
To their certain death