Minimal, memorable lyrics: "Find the cost of freedom/Buried in the ground/Mother Earth will swallow you/Lay your body down."
That's the whole song. It was the B-side of the single "Ohio." Actually that's a song I thought about the other day, when I was reading about the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. Didn't the National Guard soldiers who shot Kent State students that day say they were under attack and shot in self-defense?
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Funny, the Jan. 6 killing by the police also made me think of Kent State. Street protests throughout 2020, we might paraphrase the do-gooders: we must avoid something like Kent State (police escalating) at all costs. Jan. 6: police killing a civilian can be pretty cool if she was a Trumpian, and we can kick out another round of lies about how dangerous Jan. 6 was.
A perfect post.
The cost of freedom is personified by one David Crosby.
May God have mercy on his soul.
In this blog, under a previous article titled The FBI has found 'scant' evidence the Jan. 6 insurrection was the result of an organized plot..., I commented that I suspected that the Ashli Babbitt incident "was staged to some extent".
I no longer suspect that. I am sure that the incident was not staged at all.
[The link now is in my comment here.]
The destructive kinetic entry into a confined space and kick ass bravado of the January 6 insurrectionists are significant first order differences with an open air college protest.
False equivalence.
There are additional lyrics for the first section:
"Daylight again, following me to bed
I think about a hundred years ago, how my fathers bled
I think I see a valley, covered with bones in blue
All the brave soldiers that cannot get older been askin' after you
Hear the past a callin', from armegeddon's side
When everyone's talkin' and no one is listenin', how can we decide?"
I didn't find it cheesy at all, but I suspect that Crosby Stills & Nash intended to inspire different emotions when they made this song. But "bones in blue" seems to refer to the Civil War?
How is it that the same few perfectly identifiable Code Pink leadership were permitted into Congressional hearings multiple times after disrupting previous hearings, just to disrupt them again? Why were none of them ever arrested? Why weren’t they barred from attending hearings the very first time they shut them down with their shouting and screaming?
Why is the crazy shaman guy facing time for doing something once that Medea Benjamin and others have done multiple times?
When everyone's talkin' and no one is listenin', how can we decide?
Similar sentiment in "For What It's Worth":
There's somethin' happenin' here
But what it is ain't exactly clear
The confusion of those days is mirrored in the confusion of our own time.
You can read the lyrics in various ways depending on who the soldiers are, what your opinion of them is, who or what's buried in the ground, what it means to be buried in the ground, etc. etc.
We saw Crosby, Stills, & Nash at the Chicago Theatre in May 2015. They still sounded fairly good, and the acoustics of the venue were great.
"There are additional lyrics for the first section..."
That's a different song. On the album "So Far," "Find the Cost of Freedom" follows right after "Ohio." The single with the 2 songs is from 1970. "So Far" is from 1974. The song "Daylight Again" was sung with a segue into "Find the Cost of Freedom" on the 1982 album "Daylight Again."
"I didn't find it cheesy at all...."
I don't think "Find the Cost of Freedom" is cheesy, but I do think it would have been cheesy of me to embed it in the previous post. I was going to put it right between ""Cost" means what we paid, perhaps for everything" and "It's not the current resale value of whatever physical objects we left behind."
I'm surprised no one has come in with this yet. There was a shot from the crowd at Kent State, a school specifically targeted by the SDS for teaching radicalism. Mark Rudd and Bernadine Dohrn had both been to the campus in the previous year. James Michener, a non-radical liberal, did a lot of the investigation and published it, but more formal investigations revealed the same.
False equivalence, huh, Howard? Given the exact same details on the ground, if Babbitt had been a young black woman at a BLM riot at D.C., and Byrd had been a white Capitol security officer, you and I both know the adjudication by this DoJ would have been exactly the opposite- the hypothetical white Byrd officer would now be in jail awaiting trial, a trial with a 100% certain outcome of life in prison, or even a federal death sentence. I will even go further- you yourself be be howling for his blood.
Lucker21, the song continues as does history with this:
What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)
A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)
Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)
Mostly say, "Hooray for our side" (Ooh ooh ooh)
Gotta include the "Ooh, oohs" cu
What a field day for the heat (Ooh ooh ooh)
A thousand people in the street (Ooh ooh ooh)
Singing songs and they carrying signs (Ooh ooh ooh)
Mostly say, "Hooray for our side" (Ooh ooh ooh)
If I'm ever in a demonstration or protest, that's what my sign will read, "Hooray for our side."
This is actually a live version of "Daylight Again", the great ending track of the early 80's CSN album by the same name. It quotes the earlier "Cost of Freedom" song as it's closing.
Interesting fact: for the studio version of Daylight Again, the 4th harmony part (which, I guess, would originally have been supplied by Neil Young) is done by Art Garfunkel.
Agree with the previously expressed sentiments. Outstanding post by Althouse.
There was an initial shot fired at Kent State. We still don't know who shot it, but the Guardsmen thought they were being targeted. Ashli Babbit did not shoot or brandish a weapon. If the officer had shouted "Show me your hands." before shooting and she did not comply I might think he had a point. I suspect a law enforcement officer shooting an Antifa or BLM member during a protest because they broke a window and entered a property I think they would be in jail now.
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