Empathy And Sacrifice Lyrics

If you take some colored cellophane and tape it to your window,
In patterns like stained glass, making sure you get it all,
then by the time you wake up and the mornings coming through it,Oh what a lovely picture for your plain white wall.

And if you take that picture and you color in the lines,
until the trees reach out to meet you and the people come to life,
well then the story's far from over, there are many pages more,
oh what a perfect decoration for refrigerator doors.

And if this country were a puzzle made of wood,
with every state bearing the emblem of a resource that is good,
well then I think that we would tour it
cause I think we'd form a band,
hopscotch all those state lines,
we'd hold fifty different hands,
have fifty different houses,
Sleep in fifty different beds,
We'd play our songs for fifty different sets of friends.
And we'd eat fifty different dinners cooked in fifty different homes,
we would have fifty different families who want to watch us grow.


I am a hot kid from a cold state, there are wars yet to be won,
I won't accept unchangeable the ugly truths of being.
And so I walk into the forest, and because I am young,
The tree are all the wisest and most graceful I have seen,
and the sunlight through the tops of them is plentiful and splendid,
a varying and unmistakable green.

How they sing to me...

And they say:
We are not born human,
human maybe, but without humanity.
No, such a thing is learned, such things come with age,
and I was born an ugly, jealous little creature full of rage.
But just because you loved me my heart softened as I grew,
The rock-hard soil waxing malleable with rain,
and opened up like a cathedral, bearing everything so new,
with empathy and sacrifice where hatred used to lay.