The story is told in Testaments, New and Old
Of the river referred to as "Jordan"
The river divides two implacable sides
Of a land all too frequently warred on
While these conflicts you'd shun, you have been issued a gun
With the orders to kill or to be killed
A pawn in a game, are you really to blame
When your voice in the matter has been stilled?

The missiles still fly while the innocents die
From a hate that transcends generations
"Here our ancestors trod, we were promised by God"
But can this be the real explanation?
Invoking His Name, they keep flinging iron and flame
While ignoring His message redemptive
Will our whole world to extinction be hurled
In the wake of an air strike preemptive?

Are there any words I can use to convince
You our hopes for peace are all failing?
Why can you not hear why I'm so filled with fear
Of the demons of midnight assailing?
No one will be saved, tell me who'll dig the graves
When some madman starts pushing the button?
And yet you deny, though I can't fathom why
That we're poised on the Eve of Destruction

Looking closer to home, beneath the Capitol dome
The red and blue are in deadlock
As the deadline looms they keep moving farther apart
Trapped in a permanent gridlock
The Speaker contends that he is not giving in
Though the country and jobs are in peril
Then later that night when the public's out of sight
The debate turns increasingly feral

They sling their mud and it angers my blood
Impervious to compromising
The pundits all say that it's we who will pay
For this cliff of their willful devising
Our nation divides into separate tribes
By race and by color and gender
And nothing abides of those ideals that unite
When the truth and respect we surrender

Damascus burns, the Cairo mob turns
Blood flows deep down the Tigris-Euphrates
Persians still pose, so the party line goes
The threat of a nuclear Hades
To flee the disgrace you travel to space
The problems remain when you've landed
And the Marxist Chinese could bring us all to our knees
Will they turn us away empty handed?

On a Thanksgiving Day we all gather to pray
Asking "God bless the fruits of our labor"
The church bell chimes for all the victims of crimes
As we still go on hating our neighbor
The evidence mounts in oft-repeated accounts
That the world remains mired in corruption
Midst the pain and the grief, I can't shake your belief
That we're not on the Eve of Destruction