If You Haven’t, You Can’t Know

If you have not awakened to the sound of a creek burbling beside you

Where do you get the gall to vote against cleaning up our lakes and rivers

If you haven’t squeezed the throttle and heard the hoarse bellow and felt its raw power

You’ll never understand why OHVs are just the most fucking fun

If you never saw the earliest morning sun kiss a wild mountain basin

You can’t ever get a clue as to why wilderness might just be important

If you haven’t had one of your platoon buddies get his legs blown off right there beside you

You’ll not understand the great camaraderie even in a pointless and immoral modern war

If you never robbed a frightened white man at gunpoint when in need of a fix

You don’t understand what shaking with drug-enhanced psycho excitement is all about

If don’t know the rapture with which our savior fills our hearts

Your eyes are simply closed and your soul is truly dark and empty

If you have never gotten all shook up over the smell of meth abrewin’

You cant criticize the beutifool buzz that rots our teeth and makes our hair fall out

If you haven’t ever lost more than you could afford but just kept on playing anyways

You will never know how good it feels to win back even just a little bit

If you never stated proudly you were eager for the chance to clear your name

You cannot know why you then claim to have no comment regarding the allegations

If you never became quite still and simply regarded all of your wandering thoughts

You can derisively dismiss that phony bullshit about the sound of one hand clapping

If you haven’t nearly died and then realized you are looking at a peaceful sunset

It’s hard to know just how miraculous each and every second of our lives really is

If you should ever notice yourself dwelling on some phony sport or another

The door to your cure has begun to swing open in front of you at last

If you haven’t quite grasped the lure that drives men to unmuffle their vehicles

You really need to get right up here behind the wheel in this big bad baby

If you haven’t ever sweat too much and breathed too hard

You will not truly appreciate the gentle sun of a desert Winter

If you only ever eat vegetables, fruit and all that other so-called organic shit

You cannot understand the addictive joy of salt, sugar and hydrogenated oils

If you just read the bible and watch what’s new on TV

You’ll miss the wisdom of Mohammed and his buddy Isaac Newton

If you never spent too many lonely nights in the dark, all alone

You cannot fully appreciate the peace of slumbering together

If you’re always in an angry hurry because it’s still late once again

It really won’t be too easy to just sit there and listen to those stupid birds

If you’ve only weighed their arguments and critiqued other’s decisions

It’ll be hard for you to understand undertaking any real action of your own

If you never questioned the endless mowing, watering, fertilizing & pesticiding of your lawn

You probably never walked barefoot in some quiet forest meadow

If you really have thought through what you are saying right now

You won’t need to be told to just shut the fuck up, once again

If you haven’t hiked hard up to an alpine ridge on a clear september morning

You don’t deserve the gas it takes to drive your SUV over the pass, ever again

If you haven’t even saved a penny and lived large off of your maxed-out credit cards

Don’t bother to complain to me about those evil those Tax and Spenders

If you can’t even do the four operations of basic arithmetic in your head

Don’t you dare and try to question a scientist’s so-called fuzzy math

If you haven’t ever swam in a warm ocean during a real rain

You likely worry way too much about getting a little wet

If you can’t conceive of any society not based upon simple greedy profit motives

Sustainability surely sounds like another cockamemie liberal fairytale to you

If you never were in awe of the interwoven cycles of the web of this earth

You’ll find it easier to believe that we alone are possessed of a soul

If you still believe a god who awaits you created all of this and left behind his word

You need never even look into the void yet for even the briefest single moment

If you hadn’t seen those kids grow up and loved them so much through thick and thin

You cannot understand their exceptional nature or the uniqueness of their gifts

If you felt you always needed to stop in order to smell the roses

You were lucky, because you never noticed you really were not going anywhere...at all

Can’t Stop Our Ordained, Greed-based Progress

Keep on moving alongside of it, or get the hell out of our One True Way

These new asshole to elbow suburbs are merely blessed parts of God’s rich plan

Quit your misguided whining and chronic, spoiled, mealy-mouthed complaining

Outside developers quite naturally buy low, build cheap, sell out and move on

What could we really do differently anyway? Hey, these good people need those jobs!

Tinderbox strip malls are the climax stage in an ordained, faith-based ecological succession

How else are we going to provide for our ever-expanding human population?

The ready answer is really just about this simple – Ever bigger portions of more of the same

Just follow the money and you’ll find whose pocket putting people first always lands in

We’ve already defined the false choices so you cannot ever reframe the phony debate

You can’t stop the ordained progress upon which our vapid and consumptive lifestyle feeds

So either drive that excavator or get pushed off to the side with all the dead trees

We can’t control the future but we sure can can sniff out a quick profit in the here and now

Under Manifest Destiny we are honor bound to voraciously extract & consume, from coast to coast

Look at the good jobs we provide to the community - for up to several summers

Being constantly driven by insatiable greed merely expresses our consecrated pursuit of happiness

Listen, you can’t make a cake without breaking a few eggs, right?

So, really, you can ignore shattering the ecosystem that sustains you - To make a quick buck

Simple-minded hyper-consumption is the genius that guides the blind hand of the free market

Planning and conservation is the province of that old, tired and failed socialist agenda

With money, law and tradition behind us, we bulldoze away any and all feeble arguments

We polish our moneymaking skills by doing just what we know best, over and over and over again

There’s no stopping progress, just ask those smog-purple mountains above the once-fertile plains

Just take some more of these pills and you’ll enjoy the bounty of our febrile exploitation

We’ve got laws and precedents going back to our revered colonist forefathers

They stopped slavery but we still do what we want to the land, once we get a loan

We must tame and control, kill or be killed, slash, burn and flatten to survive

It’s man against nature in a war of attrition and our cash flow shows us winning big

We’re building on a sacred heritage of free enterprise and entrepreneurial energy

We’re deconstructing our children’s future one shoddy eco-shattering development at a time

After all, since you can’t stop progress, what is it that you are really think you can do?

Look, this farmland could return more next year as identical housing units for harried commuters

Our progress is inevitable and a foregone conclusion, just like our uncontrolled population growth

So, even though our lakes and rivers are just filthy sewage drains, there are still clean ones up north

No human force can stop a progress that has monetary gain as its ultimate and only goal

God made it so and only spoiled, out-of-touch liberals raise some witless, namby-pamby concerns

We are tightly wrapped in patriotism, God, free enterprise and Traditional Family Values©

Faith in free markets guarantees that everyone’s selfish actions will blindly yield a better future

Look, you can’t stop progress, this is all part of His wondrous design for us, his Exceptionist tribe

We’ve framed the debate and marginalized you while hyping lies to the good people, our people

Our way forward is bold and unambiguous but you would paralyze us with all your baseless fears

Our greedy individual clutching moves us all inexorably forward towards the Happily-Ever-After

You can’t stop progress unless it will make us more money more quickly, and then that’s progress

It’s like asking us to recycle for free just because it makes you feel better

We don’t condone all of these environmental impact studies and over-regulation

We measure our progress in amounts of CO₂ emitted, wetlands drained and acres deforested

The history we never learned most certainly shows that ours is the only one true way

Let there be Chinese ‘God Bless America’ flag decals on the backs of all our bulldozers

Look, your burdensome over-regulation can only cost good people, our supporters, jobs and money

This government meddling is very much akin to the failed social programs of the past

We can’t predict the outcome of our actions so we say just roll the dice and we’ll see...

We’ll solve any real problems after forcing scientists to prove they really exist...in a political debate

After all, what studies show that so-called intact ecosystems really benefit any society?...

None, but...It is true that lust for gain has clearly driven the flowering of our blessed demockracy

Them Libral Lifestyle Police

They’re gonna make you wear leather sandals and force you to barbecue tofu

They’ll be closing down all the Taco Bells and cutting off our Big Gulps

They want to quiet down your pickups and your holy harley-davidsons

I heard they even mean to make us go to school to get a license to have a damn kid

They want to stop us from draining and developing these idle, bug-filled wetlands

They don’t want your kids to pray or recite the pledge of allegiance at their school

Their godless moral relativism is destroying our Traditional Family ValuesÔ and beliefs

Pretty soon you won’t be able to say shit, even when you have a mouthful

They’re trotting out the same tired social programs that failed so many times, years ago

They want us all to drive the same kind of unsafe, uncomfortable, little shoebox cars

They are trying to take away all of our wondrous health care choices

They think that we should all be eager to recycle trash without even getting paid

They’ll have us turning down thermostats in sweaters and shivering in the dark

They preach the virtue of the flip-flop but question the very word of Jesus Christ

Their meddling with our food supply is going to cost us all a lot of money

They mean to cut into your freedom with this so-called healthy lifestyle nonsense

We’ll all be paying out the wazoo cause they’re afraid to burn a little coal

Beef and pork will be expensive and tough if the bleeding hearts get their way

They get this recurring dream of socialism they forget was disproved so long ago

They want your kids to grow up thinking the colonists did some kind of Holocaust

They’re gonna put a ban on fireworks and take the Christ child out of Christmas

They want everybody riding bicycles no matter what the weather

They mean to suck back up to the Frenchies and even start following their leads

They’re setting timetables for our defeat and letting our brave boys die in vain

They want to handcuff energy producers and stop us cutting housing timber

They’re dead set against our jet skis, OHVs, dirt bikes and snowmobiles

They want us living in gloomy dirt dugouts with unreliable solar and wind power & no A/C

They’re trampling our property rights with their squishy concerns over useless species

They’ll have us paying more per pound the more trash we throw away

They’re planning on national ID cards that they will say are just to catch illegals

They want to trot out expensive social welfare and shut down all our prisons

They’ve gone completely overboard on this expensive hoax called climate change

They’ll put fat, lazy, bitchy women over you with no way to get rid of them

They want the whole country to look like everybody goes around in wheelchairs

Pretty soon you’ll need a smog test permit for your grills and your lawnmowers

They are over-regulating our once-proud auto industry straight into bankruptcy

They want to cut off all that good cheap Chinese stuff we buy down to WalMart

They’re out to gut our military and leave us open to the terrorists with ICBMs

They plan on giving up most of our sacred sovereignty to the United Nations

They’ll pass out free birth control during your children’s hands-on sex-ed classes

They want your kids to get real comfortable with the homosexual lifestyle

They’re handcuffing entrepreneurs with burdensome environmental regulations

They wish to kill off Christianity and replace it with some new age pseudoscience

Their moral relativism would have us all believing that there is no such thing as sin

They’re gonna start to tax and regulate even the places where we worship

They’ll try to put limits on how many miles we drive in our pickup trucks per year

They want us to promote based upon race and sex and economic background

They’re gonna lock up all our federal lands from way back there in Washington

They’re pushing us all towards some vague, castrated, vegan, pacifist idealism

They want us to believe that either all the animals have souls or that we do not

They’re out to stop a guy from driving his big diesel to work if he wants to

They’ve got this silly notion that our current lifestyle is somehow unsustainable

They’re soft on defense but love to slaughter precious human embryos

They question that the marketplace efficiently replaces foolish social planning

They will handcuff the President on gathering information for national security

They think that outside developers should not have the right to local control

They want to cripple the power industry over a few tons of mercury emissions

They’ll put hybrids into NASCAR and want canoes in the bass tournaments

They have no respect for the NFL and those big blacks shimmering in their tights

They’re even against the well-trimmed green lawns that we fertilize and fumigate

They want to take away your guns but let doctors go murder more unborn babies

They’re all for letting any Illegals in to take our jobs and give their kids some welfare

They claim that corporate agricultural entities only care about their stock prices

They say that raising our packaged meat as cheap as possible is dirty and immoral

They’re pushing this fuzzy sustainability crap which will cost us all in jobs and money

They’ll make you exercise and eat raw broccoli convinced it makes you healthy

They want to teach the bible as literature instead of out front in biology classes

They’ll have us loading groceries in dirty recycled bags into weenie little golf carts

They’re putting plants and animals ahead of families and national security

They want everyone to live like bees in tiny city apartment hives without any yards

They would legalize marijuana but track and control alcohol consumption

They even seem to think that being born again has something to do with recycling