Nowhere Else to Be

"Because We’ve Got Nowhere Else to Be"

(intro with harmonica)

Well I walked into the coffee shop

And gave her some literature on the SOA

She said I don’t want to know about this

So please just go away

I said what you gotta against them poor?

Is your ivory tower worth fightin’ for?

She said go away

Then everything will be okay

So Michael and I packed our bags and said hey let’s go

I’m tired of America and we need to get on down to El Salvador

Meanwhile she drank her coffee and her tea

And thought nothin’ of me nor the man on the street

She just threw away her life and said

You bums don’t mean nothin’ to me

CHORUS

So it was me and Michael and Dan and John

We watched Slumdog, threw up and said

Hey man I’m sick of this damn town!

Let’s go somewhere and be free

Wear some rags on our backs and

nothin’ on our feet

They’ll sue us for spreading peace

But we don’t care because we’ve

nowhere else to be

Verse 2

Well she did it you know

She got that first book deal

Drugged the church with knowledge

taught ’em how to shoot to kill

Zinn said what’s all this for?

You look like just another scholar–tired and bored

While Michael and me had somethin’ to say about Jesus

Chorus 2

Well it was me and Michael and Dan and John

Some dreamers that never grew up and said

we’re sick of this damn town

Let’s go somewhere and be free

Wear some rags on our backs and

nothin’ on our feet

They’ll sue us for spreading peace

But we don’t care because we’ve

nowhere else to be

Yeah… she’s somebody now but she ain’t free

She still thinks nothin’ of Michael and me

Yeah… we’ve still got rags on our feat

And they’re still suing us for spreadin’ peace

But we’ve still got nowhere else to be

(harmonica solo)

The Wind Cries Freedom, the new book from Z co-founder Michael Albert, is a sweeping oral history of a future American revolution.

Through thirty interconnected chapters, it draws out the strategies, failures, turning points, and hard-won wisdom of a movement that called itself the Revolutionary Participatory Society. These are not the polished memoirs of politicians: they are the unfiltered accounts of people who organized in neighborhoods, hospitals, universities, stadiums, courthouses, and places of worship, and kept a shared vision alive through cynicism and exhaustion.

The result is speculative political fiction that reads like history: messy, human, and quietly hopeful in the way that only real experience and long thought can produce.

Get your copy and peruse more features on the book’s website below.

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Critical Action is a longtime friend of Z and a music and storytelling project grounded in liberation, solidarity, and resistance to authoritarian power. Through music, narrative, and multimedia, the project engages the same political realities and movement traditions that guide and motivate Z’s work.

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Nowhere Else to Be

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