The Way the Wind Blew

My name is not important, I'm 45 years old
 I am dying slowly, the truth it must be told
 I have children I had hoped to raise, work I hoped to do
 But now my life is ended by the way the wind blew
 Washington's my home and I have lived here all my life
 My father worked for Hanford for his children and his wife
 He never knew the winds he loved that blew across the plain
 Carried death as surely as a rain cloud carries rain
 The wind it can blow softly as a mother with her child
 The wind it can blow loudly; the wind it can blow wild
 But the winds that frighten me the most are silent as the snow
 The politicians know these winds and bend the way they blow
 When I was four, the plant put radiation in the wind
 Called the leak the Green Run--measured with their charts and pins
 Who knows why they did it - it's classified you see
 But it killed a lot of friends of mine, and now it's killing me
 I knew my friends were dying - no one ever would say why
 Cancer was as common as the clouds up in the sky
 And some suspected Hanford - but the powers that be
 Said the plant was safe and we were taught to believe
 Now Hanford made the bomb that dropped on Nagasaki
 But it wasn't just those innocents who died so horribly
 Our death has no meaning, it is hard and it is slow
 And it's the same damn government who's murdered us, you know
 The great Columbia River you see rolling along
 Carried nuclear waste enough for two atom bombs
 The cows who grazed this farmland, milk for daughters and for sons
 Carried death as surely as a loaded gun
 But now the secret's coming out, and lawsuits there will be
 But who can give me back the life they've taken now from me?
 I'm angry and I'm frightened and I'm tellin' you
 The difference between us, my friend, is the way the wind blew