1) One of the two best songs Chapin ever wrote. (and that's saying something.) Whether it's #1 or #2 depends on how you feel about 'Sniper'. Even 'Cats in the Cradle' and 300, 000 Pounds of Bananas' can't hang with these two. ('Corey's Coming' is another gem). 2) If you don't get the basics of this, you either didn't grow up in the USA, or you're a cement block. That said. 3) White racism in the USA trains/grooms/raises some African-American children to be killers it simply doesn't do to other ethnic groups. From the segregated housing ('paint chis that fell from the ceiling'), paying for school with property taxes, so the poor always get less ('left back twice by the seventh grade') and of course, good ol' mass incarceration ('in jail he changed from a junkie to a hater'). Then you send him to war, let him kill for you, and then turn him loose with no support into a society he's never been trained to function in ('There was only a couple of things that he was really trained for. And he found himself drifting back to 'em') This song is a brilliant condemnation of how the USA treats African American males from the inner city, constructed by a master storyteller. And if you're too locked up in your own privileged world to be affected by this song, let me recommend you Chapin's 'Sniper. Equally brilliant, if not better. And you'll never have to ask yourself why mass-murder is so common in the USA again. We lost so much when Harry Chapin died.