I’d like to say that people . . .
See, see, they used to ask me:
“So how you . . . you guys think you’re gonna change the world?”
Like some smart-ass newspaper reporter.
Who wouldn’t know . . . who wouldn’t know tenderness from a can of beans.
“Huh, so you think you guys have got the”—the audacity they used to say—“to think you can change the world?”
And, man, when they push you down, it’s hard not to fall.
But that was 10 years ago.
And I’ve been thinking about that.
“So you think you schmucks can change the world?” they’d to say to us.
And they said it so often that you began to believe them.
Which is fatal.
Trust thyself.
And so now I’d like to say:
People can change anything they want to.
And that means everything in the world.
Show me any country, and there’ll be people in it.
And it’s the people who make the country.
And people have got to stop pretending they ain’t on the world.
People are running about following their little tracks.
I am one of them.
But we’ve all got to stop just following our own little mousetrail.
We’ve got to—
People can do anything.
This is something I am beginning to learn.
People are out there doing bad things to each other.
It’s because they’ve been dehumanized.
It’s time to take humanity back into the center of the ring and follow that for a time.
Greed!
It ain’t goin’ anywhere.
The richest person in the world is the most unhappy one.
They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square.
You know?
Think on that.
Without people you’re nothing.
That’s my spiel.
Joe Strummer
