Obediently Yours

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[tool: 歌词滚动姬 https://lrc-maker.github.io]

[Narration: Orson Welles and Logic]

This is Logic

I've spoken these words before but not on the radio

To be born free is to be born in debt

To live in freedom without fighting slavery

To profiteer

I've let Southerners to expect and fear a Negro insurrection

I see no purpose in holding this from general discussion

There may be those within that outcast ten percent of the American people

Who someday will strike back to their oppressors

But to put down that mob, a mob would riot

I'd like to ask, please: who will put down that mob?

I'm an overpaid producer with pleasant reasons to rejoice

And I do, in the wholesome practicability of the profit system

But, surely my right to having more than enough is cancelled

If I don't use that more to help those who have less

I owe the very profit I make to the people I make it from

If this is radicalism, it comes automatically to most of us in show business

It being generally agreed any public man knows his position to the public:

That's what I mean when I say I'm your obedient servant

We must, each day, learn what we own

A healthy man owes to the sick all that he can do for them

An educated man owes to the ignorant all that he can do for them

A free man owes to the world's slaves all that he can do for them

And what is to be done is more, much more, than good words

Christmas baskets, bonuses and tips, and bread and circuses

There is only one thing to be done with slaves: free them

If we can't die on behalf of progress, we can live for it

Progress, we Americans take to mean, is a fuller realization of democracy

A measure of progress as we understand it is a measure of equality enjoyed by all men

We can do something about that

The way our fighting brothers and sisters look down at it

Some of them dead as I speak these words: the way they look at it, we're lucky

And they're right, we're lucky to be alive, but only if our lives make life itself worth dying for

We must be worthy of our luck or we are damned

Our lives are spared but this is merely the silliest of accidents

Unless we put the gift of life into the hard employments of justice

If we waste that gift, we won't have anywhere to hide from the indignation of history

I want to say this: the morality of the auction block is out of date

There is no room in the American century for Jim Crow

Tomorrow's democracy discriminates against discrimination

It's charter won't include the freedom to end freedom

Race hate isn't human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature

But this is true: there are alibis for the phenomenal excuses

Economic and the social, but the brutal fact is simply this

Where the racist lies acceptable, there is corruption

The race haters must be stopped

The lynchings must be stopped

The murders must be avenged

I come in that boy's name and in the name of all

Who, in this land of ours, have no voice of their own

I come with a call for action: this is the time for it

I call for action against the cause of riot

It won't surprise me if I am accused in some quarters of inciting to riot

While I'm very interested in riots

I'm very interested in avoiding them so I call for action against the cause of riots

Law is the best action, the most decisive

It's in the people's power to see good but what makes lynchings and starts wars is dealt with

Not by well wishes but by policemen, and I mean good policemen

Over several generations, maybe there'll be men who can't be weaned away from the fascist vices of race hate

But we should deny such men responsibility in public affairs exactly

As we deny responsibility to the wretched victims of the drug habit

If there are laws against peddling dope, there can be laws against peddling race hate

But every man has the right to his own opinion as an American

But race hate is not an opinion, it's a phobia

It isn't a viewpoint, race hate is a disease

In a people's world, the incurable racist has no rights

He must be deprived of influence in a people's government

He must be segregated as he, himself would segregate the colored and semitic peoples

Anything very big is very simple; if there's a big race question

There's a big answer to it, and a big answer is simple, like the word "no"

America can write her name across this century, and so she will

If we, the people, brown and black and red, rise now to the great occasion of our brotherhood

It will take courage; it calls for the doing of great deeds which means the dreaming of great grieves

Giving the world back to its inhabitants is too big a job for the nearly practical

No one of us wants to live to see a flameless peace:

We strive and pray and die for what will be here when we're gone

Our children's children are the ancestors of a free people

To the generations: the fight is worth it

And that just about means that my time is up

When my time's up, I remain as always: obediently yours