Help Save the Youth of America

Track 8 on Talking with the Taxman About Poetry

Producers

This song, released in 1986, is an inversion of a popular sentiment at the time that residents of rich countries ought to contribute money and other resources to programs… Read More

Sep. 22, 19861 viewer5.4K views

Help Save the Youth of America Lyrics

Help save the youth of America
Help save them from themselves
Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys
And the Californian girls

When the lights go out in the rest of the World
What do our cousins say
They're playing in the sun and having fun, fun, fun
Till Daddy takes the gun away

From the Big Church to the Big River
And out to the Shining Sea
This is the Land of Opportunity
And there's a Monkey Trial on TV

A nation with their freezers full
Are dancing in their seats
While outside another nation
Is sleeping in the streets

Don't tell me the old, old story
Tell me the truth this time
Is the Man in the Mask or the Indian
An enemy or a friend of mine

Help save the youth of America
Help save the youth of the world
Help save the boys in uniform
Their mothers and their faithful girls

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Listen to the voice of the soldier
Down in the killing zone
Talking about the cost of living
And the price of bringing him home

They're already shipping the body bags
Down by the Rio Grande
But you can fight for democracy at home
And not in some foreign land

And the fate of the great United States
Is entwined in the fate of us all
And the incident at Tschernobyl proves
The world we live in is very small

And the cities of Europe have burned before
And they may yet burn again
And if they do I hope you understand
That Washington will burn with them
Omaha will burn with them
Los Alamos will burn with them

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About

This song, released in 1986, is an inversion of a popular sentiment at the time that residents of rich countries ought to contribute money and other resources to programs aiming to help residents of poorer countries. (The UK-based Band Aid campaign launched in 1984, followed in 1985 by the Live Aid concert in the UK and the USA for Africa supergroup’s single “We Are the World.”)

Amid left-wing cynicism about these commercially successful efforts, exemplified by Chumbawamba’s 1986 album Pictures of Starving Children Sell Records, Bragg offers a wry perspective: In another sense it’s actually the rest of the world that ought to help young Americans find both the hunger and opportunity for social change in the comfortable but combustible United States.