Joe Hill was known not only as a labor organizer but as a songwriter.
This was his best known song, “The Preacher and the Slave.”
There are different versions, but the music is set to “Sweet Bye and Bye.”
The words are more or less like this (not exactly the same as what you heard if you clicked the YouTube link):
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ’bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die.The starvation army they play,
They sing and they clap and they pray
‘Till they get all your coin on the drum
Then they’ll tell you when you’re on the bum:Holy Rollers and jumpers come out,
They holler, they jump and they shout.
Give your money to Jesus they say,
He will cure all diseases today.
If you fight hard for children and wife —
Try to get something good in this life —
You’re a sinner and bad man, they tell,
When you die you will sure go to hell.Workingmen of all countries, unite,
Side by side we for freedom will fight;
When the world and its wealth we have gained
To the grafters we’ll sing this refrain:
FINAL CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
When you’ve learned how to cook and to fry.
Chop some wood, ’twill do you good,
And you’ll eat in the sweet bye and bye.
He who has ears, let him hear…..or something like that….
No kidding–a Dallas school board mis-trustee actually said teachers would get their rewards in Heaven.
I think he believes this so he doesn’t have to feel guilty about the way he votes.
http://www.disdblog.com/2013/04/30/disd-trustee-morath-speaks-with-forked-tongue/
See the end of the 3rd paragraph.
I wonder how he would feel if his “rewards” were delayed until after his death.
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead.”
“I never died,” says he.
Joe Hill’s ghost is gathering strength from the very forces that wish to weaken him. There is enormous latent power there in the country. I tend to think that the oligarchy has no clue about the extent to which that is so.
Joe Hill’s last will and testament.
My will is easy to decide,
For there is nothing to divide.
My kin don’t need to fuss and moan –
“Moss does not cling to a rolling stone.”
My body? Ah, if I could choose,
I would to ashes it reduce,
And let the merry breezes blow
My dust to where some flowers grow.
Perhaps some fading flower then
Would come to life and bloom again.
This is my last and final will.
Good luck to all of you,
JOE HILL.
Remember this the next time you see one of the well-fed and well-compensated leaders of the ‘new civil rights movement’ appear on some MSM forum. They risk nothing in the fierce pursuit of $tudent $ucce$$ but cover themselves with the genuine sacrifices of others far superior in moral and intellectual worth.
Their words don’t match their actions, they do not walk their own talk.
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.” [Homer]
Those old Greek guys still have a thing or two to teach us.
🙂
The number of college graduates working for minimum wage has increased by 70% in 10 years. Remind me why kids need to be career and college ready with the Common Core. There are no Civics lessons in Common Core, so they will be economically, mentally and politically neutered.
The Common Core is part of an overall mindset that the children of the masses are to be trained to be obedient do bots with the “grit, tenacity, and perseverance” to do what their overlords–the guys like Duncan, with no qualifications except the right connections, tell them to do. Ask these guys. It’s all about “training the 21st century workforce.” And what does that workforce look like? It earns minimum wage. It’s subservient. It does whatever mindless, fill-in-the-bubble sort of task is required. It is continually monitored and assessed. Schooling for this class becomes training, to be differentiated from education for the sons and daughters of the plutocracy.
A previous post that I made on this subject:
“It’s no secret that income inequality has skyrocketed in the United States in recent decades, that economic and social mobility have plummeted, that wealth has been increasingly concentrated at the top, and that increasingly, the affluent in this country are isolated in their own circles–living in their own separate neighborhoods; sending their kids to their own separate schools from preschool through college; keeping their money offshore; spending much of their time in homes outside the country; and so on.
“Isolation from ordinary people breeds contempt and prejudice. Lack of intimate, long-term interaction with ordinary people makes it easier for the wealthy to generalize about “those people,” whoever they might be–workers, teachers, the poor, etc., and to buy into across-the-board, one-size-fits-all prescriptions regarding those Others. It becomes easy to think that it makes sense that we have a top-down, mandated, invariant curriculum for the masses based upon the vise of invariant standards on the one side and invariant tests on the other if one thinks of teachers, students, workers, the poor–of any group of people outside the privileged class–as homogenous. “If only we held those people accountable via a standardized test!” begins to sound sensible, even though giving the same test to every third grader is equivalent to giving the same certification exam to plumbers, doctors, airplane mechanics, and NBA players. And when the privileged, with all their accomplishments and clout, make such generalizations, others buy in out of fear and self interest and, of course, respect. How could a man as clearly brilliant and skilled as, say, Bill Gates, be so terribly wrong? Our politicians left and right have almost entirely bought into the absurd generalizations underpinning the accountability movement. And our educational “leaders” have lacked all leadership; they haven’t had the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.
“There are two main issues here: First, we can have liberty, or we can have standardized objectives (and, inevitably, the standardized curricula that follow from them) mandated by a small, centralized, unaccountable, totalitarian authority. Second, we can recognize students’ uniqueness and diversity and foster their individual propensities and talents, or we can give them a homogenous, one-size-fits-all education.
“It’s astonishing to me that there is even any debate about which we should do. And it’s horrifying that our “leaders”–professional education people–have come down so often on the side of taking away educators’ autonomy, their ability to make their own decisions about what to teach, when, and to whom.”