Patriot Act

[Intro] Policing the people, Babylon Policing the people, policing the people Babylon, policing the people [Verse] Product of partition Dripped in Prada for the stitching Proud of superstitions Got powder in the kitchen Powerful [?] Superpowers be killing ya America, Britain, power for villains Powerful positions, power for the pigeons, powder for the chitlins Power for offshore drilling Pirates plunder, pillage, killing civilians Counting, currency's millions Politics make victim for income Parlor tricks, schism from system Babylon policing the people Take a man and they shift him That's Patriot Act That's a privacy prison, that Pentagon They vision is prism Got what we ask for, someone to listen Handcuffs, mother on phone Jail cell martyr whose stoned Guard your home, label with stones Government drones, cookie-cutter clones [Outro] Then the towers fell in front of my eyes And I remember the principal said they wouldn't And for a month they used my high school as a triage And so we went to school in Brooklyn And the city's board of Ed hired shrinks for the students And maybe I should have seen one And from then on they called us all Osama This old Sikh man on the bus was Osama I was Osama, we were Osama Are you Osama? And so we rushed to buy flags for our doors Bright American flags that read "I am not Osama" And we ironed our polo shirts and we combed our hair And we proudly paid our taxes And we immediately donated to a local white politician And we yelled "I'm just like you" as quietly and calmly as we could So as not to raise too much attention and be labeled a troublemaker and lose one's job Like when my name is too long to pronounce at work and raised too much attention And I was labeled a troublemaker, so I changed it And we scrubbed words like bomb from our vocabulary And airports changed to us forever Where another blue uniform came to represent oppression or undressing And another blue uniform came to represent stops and frisks, depressing And our parents began to fear for our lives whenever we walked out the door Because they read the news, and another cab driver was beaten to death And yesterday, more than 10 years later, another man from the neighborhood was deported I went to expensive white people school with his daughter For four years we read books and together we yelled "I'm just like you" But she won't get to correct her father's English at dinner anymore And the FBI harassed one of my dad's friends so much he packed up his stuff and took his family and they moved back to Pakistan They would come at night and they would wake them up and make a mess, and the mess upset his wife Those giant metal birds in the sky brought my parents near and made things confusing And then crashed into those buildings and made things confusing But I guess it's okay because my dad wasn't deported And I still get to correct his English at dinner So he doesn't raise too much attention and get labeled a troublemaker