Gil Scott-Heron's 'Work For Peace'

If the headline over the previous post kind of rang a bell, it's because you are old enough or tuned in enough (or both) to be familiar with the Gil Scott-Heron poem "Work for Peace."

The Military and the Monetary,
they get together whenever they think it's necessary.
War in the desert sometimes sure is scary,
but they beamed out the war to all their subsidiaries.
Tried to make So Damn Insane a worthy adversary,
keeping the citizens secondary,
scaring old folks into coronaries.

The Military and the Monetary,
from thousands of miles in a Saudi Arabian sanctuary,
kept us all wondering if all of this was really truly necessary.

We've got to work for Peace,
Peace ain't coming this way.
If we only work for Peace,
If everyone believed in Peace the way they say they do,
we'd have Peace.

The only thing wrong with Peace
is that you can't make no money from it.

The Military and the Monetary,
they get together whenever they think it's necessary,
hey've turned our brothers and sisters into mercenaries,
they are turning the planet into a cemetery.

Got to work for Peace,
Peace ain't coming this way.

We should not allow ourselves to be misled
by talk of entering a time of Peace.
Peace is not the absence of war,
it is the absence of the rules of war and the threats of war and the
preparation for war.
Peace is not the absence of war,
it is the time when we will all bring ourselves closer to each other,
closer to building a structure that is unique within ourselves
because we have finally come to Peace within ourselves.

"Work for Peace" also appeared as a poem-song on "Reflections," a 1994 album.

Make no mistake about it, Scott-Heron is the true father of rap music, but aside from his oft-quoted poem-song, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," this brilliant spoken word performer has labored in relative obscurity.