Phil Ochs: There but for Fortune.

 Why am I sat here, a few minutes before 2019, older but not wiser, wondering like old people do if I will be around this time next year? Anyhow a huge chunk of my life has been spent, trying to stop the bomb, and stop poverty, war and injustice and hoping that we could build a better fairer world where no chid dies from poverty or dirty water or exploitation or from war.
 I started out trying to do these seemingly impossible things just after reading Jack London’s, “People of the Abyss “ which graphically told how, in the late nineteenth century a few miles from where the Queen ruled over one of the largest empires in the world children were living in their own tawdry empire of filth and degradation want and ignorance. It confirmed me in  my own embryonic socialist beliefs, made me angry and prepared in 1957, if necessary, to take to the streets to do something about it, which I subsequently did in peace and hopefully with dignity.
 But it has all been a waste of time and nothing has changed. The world is still controlled by the 1% who sit in their gilded palaces, just like Queen Victoria did back, in Jack London’s time, only now they are destroying our beautiful  planet as well as grinding us into the dirt, with their lust for more and more money and power. Jeremy Corbyn needs to save us all now.
 This young man, a genius, a poet and songwriter, many thousands of miles away from me in the USA, at the same time was trying to do the same thing  but in the end the effort was too much for him and he took his leave of this dirty, rotten world.

 Here’s hoping that you may be able to watch the full film here. Don’t give up fighting, we all owe it to those that came before and those to come, if there is to be any future for them.