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…