The Trouble With Normal - Bruce Cockburn

Strikes across the frontier and strikes for higher wage

Planet lurches to the right as ideologies engage

Suddenly it's repression, moratorium on rights

What did they think the politics of panic would invite?

Person in the street shrugs -- "Security comes first"

But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Callous men in business costume speak computerese
Play pinball with the 3rd world trying to keep it on its knees
Their single crop starvation plans put sugar in your tea
And the local 3rd world's kept on reservations you don't see
"It'll all go back to normal if we put our nation first"
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse

Fashionable fascism dominates the scene
When ends don't meet it's easier to justify the means
Tenants get the dregs and landlords get the cream
As the grinding devolution of the democratic dream
Brings us men in gas masks dancing while the shells burst
The trouble with normal is it always gets worse

(Toronto 30/6/81)

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