Double Impact
From Free Your Voice
Baltimore high school students stun school board with rap on environmental injustice!
There is a plan to build the nations’ largest incinerator less than a mile away from our schools here in Baltimore. Our community already has the most air pollution in Maryland and our lives are cut short because of where we were born. We learned that Baltimore City Public Schools are in a contract to buy energy from the incinerator. On Tuesday, May 27th we went to the school board meeting to let them know that the incinerator is failed development and that we need to work together to stop it. The health of our community needs to be put first, we demand Fair Development!
We wrote this song to send the message that we can stand up and make a choice!
Free Your Voice Anthem
Written and performed by Double Impact: Audrey and Leah Rozier
Verse 1:
18 year old girl living in a world where no one cares about the safety of this girl
I’m disgusted, I can’t believe we trusted the world but it’s not too late to be adjusted
Money money money that seems to be the anthem
Destroying the world and always taking it for granted
No more green, only buildings and all that I can see is landfills and
We have our rights according to the amendments
But why do we feel like we’ve been so resented
Ignored, shoved to the side where opinions don’t matter where opinions only die
It’s time to stand up, let our voices be heard
Incinerator move cause you’re not preferred
It’s about that time, to make the choice
Imma stand up and free my voice
Chorus:
It’ll all get better, we can change the world
And it starts with music, get your message heard
You’ve gotta free your voice, from all the boys to the girls
It’ll all get better, we can change the world
Verse 2:
This life starts with the air that we breathe
And trying to succeed
Not the air that we need
The eye is deceived
But with all this pollution
Instead of giving
does all of the killing
How many do we need
Until the smoke clogs up and we can’t feel our chest
With everyone competitive
Just worried bout the money
When you think opportunity
The air quality will help and keep you livin
It’s like good deeds are forbidden
And everyone is looking to take
Not knowing that the bad polluted air
If the incinerator takes away a breath
Until there is nothing thats left
And the ones who don’t catch the symptoms
Are considered blessed
It time for change
Before our planet gets destroyed
Before death, is something we cannot avoid
The time is now before we don’t have a choice
So let’s stand tall together, and free our voice
Free Your Voice is a human rights committee of United Workers. We are a group of leaders, largely students, who work to understand our world and how we can build genuine unity to solve the problems we all face. Two years ago we learned about the plan to build the nations’ largest incinerator less than a mile from our high school and elementary school in Curtis Bay. The incinerator is an example of failed development that violates our basic human rights. Free Your Voice is organizing a campaign to put the health of our communities first and to stop the incinerator.
Stop the Incinerator Blog
United Workers
Free Your Voice Facebook
From “EPA’s next challenge: Protect communities in nation’s industrial dumping grounds” by Brentin Mock, published in Grist.org:
In Baltimore, the state has permitted a new waste incinerator in a neighborhood that’s regularly blitzed by pollution from surrounding industrial plants. In Mossville, La., an African American community founded by freed slaves is circled by 14 toxic industrial facilities — just one part of a broader region so saturated with polluters that it’s been labeled “Cancer Alley.”
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