Bell bottom hip huggers And my Frankenstein shoes That had stack soles and heels That I could only barely use. A crop-top sleeveless tee shirt With a superman emblem on it And diamond ring on my hand. In case I might have to pawn it.
Because we were picketing Downtown at the City Hall And at some police stations. It was the seventies after all. Our parents raised us to acquiesce It was their America they protected. And it was just exactly this blindness That we, en masse, all rejected.
We failed to understand them The generations that came before That prized prejudice and bias And celebrated sending us to war. We felt there was another way To go about sweeping social change. We saw beating and fire hosing As nefarious and more than strange.
We got beaten ourselves and jailed For just pointing injustice out to them And watched our sit-ins and love-ins Turned into scenes of ****** mayhem. We heard them call us all criminals, Long haired ******* was a favored taunt. It seems we were entitled to our opinions As long as we didn’t chose to flaunt.
It felt so very much like **** Germany Including storm troopers and jack boots And the local politicians were obviously At least agreeing if not in cahoots With the police in their fear of rebellion And protecting their good paying jobs. So, they beat us and vilified the students Calling them ***** communists, and slobs.
And, yes, some of us were getting high Back in our homes and apartments. Sometimes it seemed the only way We could deal with the estrangement Between what our country said it was And what it turned out it really was. It was hard to realize our land wasn’t free And there was no social Santa Claus.