Liberty and Justice for All

Do you often remember the day the soldiers came
When you became a number, not a child with a name
How oft do you recall that specific day
When they sold your family home and took you all away

Banished to the desert to live in hot tar shacks
Having no idea if you’d be ever coming back
How oft do you recall walking to the school
Being taught about the glories of democratic rule

As you sat beneath the watchtower, surrounded by a wall
With liberty and justice for all

Do you often remember the young men allowed to leave
To go fight and die in Europe, their families left to grieve
In shacks there in the desert, locked behind a gate
As you went to class each morning in these United States

Chorus

Do you often remember reciting those strange words
As you held your hand on heart did it all seem so absurd
One nation indivisible, one nation under God
Condemned to live behind the wire by a presidential nod

Chorus

Do you often remember the day your family was set free
And you went back to the coast beside the Pacific sea
Without a home to go to, no soil left to till
When you’d recite the pledge each morning was it a very bitter pill

Did you recall the watchtower…

Chord Charts for Selected Songs

“Liberty and Justice for All” appears on the 2015 CD, The Other Side, as well as on Live in Rostrevor (2016).

George Takei and thousands of other Japanese-American children spent very formative years of their childhoods imprisoned in internment camps. In which they went to school and recited the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, while surrounded by barbed wire and soldiers pointing guns at them. “With liberty and justice for all.”