An Experiment in Scotch

The SWAT team knocks down another door
in search of someone’s bag of pot.
The snitch gave them the wrong address.
No drugs were found
Just a sleep­ing fam­ily man
Pulls a gun to pro­tect him­self.
But it’s OK, only he got shot.

A lit­tle girl, orphan now
Daddy died before her eyes,
Pro­tect­ing her but not so well.
His hand on her face was all she knew
and now she’s just a ward of state.

Same judge who signed the war­rant
jus­ti­fy­ing the unjust raid
sends her off to fos­ter care,
Smugly thinks she’s bet­ter off.
Now two lives are wasted
on a non-existent bag of pot.

The snitch gets off, the cop goes free,
the judge escapes rep­ri­mand
and we pre­tend not to see
that life is dif­fer­ent than before.
When it can hap­pen to any­one
inno­cent and free of blame,
we’ve lost our free­dom, lost our way
and we’ve done it to ourselves.

To gain it back would be dif­fi­cult,
we’ve grown accus­tomed to this tragedy.
It’s all around us every day,
like winter’s chill and blow­ing wind, we accli­mate to it.
But with­out our free­dom we can­not be
that shin­ing light upon a hill.

We may not have the strength to change
after all, it did not hap­pen to us or ours.
But if we don’t, we all have lost
our lives in that same way.

–Anony­mous