Ask Me Why

They'll sit me down and ask me Who radicalized my mind And I'll look them back straight in the face And defend my so called crime I've watched and waited for change to come Seen the smokestacks ever belching on Seen the trees fall Fall away Seen the waters leached with death and decay I've hoped that greed would be defeated Party candidates pledging to treat it Individuals crying out for conservation But now that I'm sitting here let's have that conversation For you the government has turned a blind eye To the environmental destruction that scorches the sky You have let the corporations snatch away the wild with greed Allowed species to die and ignorance to breed You have thrown our generation down a dark dark path With temperatures rising And forests resizing And species declining And pollution flying And water reclining And destruction climbing With air that one can't breathe With water that you can't drink With the world on the brink Yet you still do not think That this one Earth we have Should be taken care of That the wild should be ours to enjoy Not for companies to exploit So tell me who radicalized my mind Was it me or a terror group that you find To blame for what you call insane Or was it you Who stood by and watched Disregarding that greed that comes at a cost Handing us down a blackened planet Refusing to hear the words of the unheard Who speak for these wild spaces, The trees and the birds We who cry to stop this mad foul descent Into unrepairable colorless end Tell me are my actions so extreme To stand up for the quiet, the wild, the green Tell me that it is extreme to pray For future generations to live healthy Free of the grey Tell me companies is it really worth the toll That your money grab pays on Earth's soul Do you not have the empathy to see That what you are doing is killing your children Does wealth truly equate to more than the world Can you not see that money matters not to those who do not breathe Your wealth will be the dirt over your grave And the graves of the millions of lives of lives you decayed By filling their blood with leeching black oil Cursing their lungs with air so soiled Cracking their lips, bursting their skin From the search for clean water that runs thin Their body lies shrunken, skinny and scorned From the lack of food The soil deformed And purged of the life that once could support A world of seven billion humans and more So I ask once again do I need to explain Why my actions are so untamed Tell me to my face Look me in my eye And say to me that my actions Lie unjustified