Sometimes I am SO late to a great song. Bruce Cockburn released “If I Had A Rocket Launcher” back in 1984, and I somehow missed it for almost 40 years. I caught the song a few years back played on XPN, and knew I had to give it multiple listens and stick it in one of my favorite Spotify lists. Thank you XPN.
This song was sometimes mistakenly seen as a call for violence, but this song is specifically about the pain and the human reaction for retribution when involved in war violence, in this particular case Guatamala in the 1980s. War begets more war, a lesson our species doesn’t seem to want to remember. Cockburn remembers.