He Still Recalls The Old Battle Yell

Bruce Springsteen: Land of Hope and Dreams

To be hopeful
in bad times
is not just
foolishly romantic.
It is based
on the fact
that human history
is a history
not only of cruelty,
but also of compassion,
sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose
to emphasize
in this
complex history
will determine
our lives.
If we see
only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places--and there are so many--where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
--Howard Zinn

Judy Collins: Marat / Sade


There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate--died of malnutrition--because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.
--John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath