There but for Fortune

Today's "Daily Prompt" from Wordpress is Fortune.  My first thought was of Phil Och's song from back in the 1960's:

There but For Fortune     by Phil Ochs

 

Show me a prison, show me a jail
Show me a prisoner whose face has gone pale
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
And there but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the alley, show me the train
Show me a hobo who sleeps out in the rain
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the whiskey stains on the floor
Show me the drunken man as he stumbles out the door
And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, may go you or I

Show me the country where the bombs had to fall
Show me the ruins of the buildings once so tall
And I'll show you a young land with so many reasons why
There but for fortune, go you or I -- you and I

 

I sang many of Phil's songs in those days. My favorite was "Changes" but I'll talk about that one another day.

 

I want to cut and paste some paragraphs from an article in the Washington Post a few months back, titled

Why Phil Ochs is the obscure ’60s folk singer America needs in 2017

 

 

“…It isn’t often that Ochs, who died four decades ago and is mostly unknown to those born since the 1970s, gets even a brief moment of mainstream recognition. Yet as we enter the Trump era, and as a new mass protest movement begins to take shape, his music would be worthy of a revival. Taken together, his songs offer an exceptionally compelling tour of the deepest questions currently confronting liberals — questions about democracy, dissent and human decency in a grim political age.

“…“The War Is Over” suggests how political resistance in any age can be enlivened, refreshed and perhaps even galvanized by jarring notes of artistic creativity. Yet it isn’t close to being Ochs’s most philosophical work. Take, for instance, “There but for Fortune,” the most beautiful song ever written about the natural lottery. To a series of tragic circumstances — “show me a prison man whose face is growing pale,” “show me the country where the bombs had to fall” — Ochs attaches a simple refrain: “There but for fortune may go you or I.” It’s a succinct reminder of the ethical basis of modern liberalism: that in a world with no level playing field, we have sizable obligations to those who are less lucky. And it’s an overarching message that Democrats, after a campaign in which their nominee tended to favor discrete policy proposals over sweeping moral vision, would be wise to rediscover.

By Richard Just     in Washington Post