Hate your next door neighbor
But don't forget to say grace.

The Eastern world

There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave

Violence flarin'

The Eastern world

Let's not kid ourselves: 'Red China' and 'Alabama' don't even come close to rhyming. Even for a 60's/folk/protest song, that's a bit of a stretch.

I think the vision for this song was too big for the rhyming dictionary. Regulation, legislation, integration, disintegration ... finding rhymes must have been way 'too frustratin' '

In 1971, six years after this song, The 26th Amendment was ratified, lowering the legal age for voting to 18.

Four days in space was major headlines back in the mid-60's. We now have the International Space Station which has been occupied continuously since 2000.

Forgot earlier about the opening verse, upabove, of Barry McGuire's "Eve Of Destruction", had a shoutout to the Jordan River, a real river in the Middle East.

"Eve Of Destruction" by folk rocker Barry McGuire was a #1 song in the fall of 1965, and literally one of the first of it's kind -- an anti-Vietnam War song and expresses worry about the continuing escalation of the nuclear arms race between the then Soviet Union and the United States. "The hate in Red China" reference is referencing the Mao violent "Cultural Revolution" that was taking place in the mid-1960's. The "Selma, Alabama" reference is about the civil rights movement that was meeting with stiff and sometimes violent reaction in that area of the country, with one of the more violent places being Selma. The two lines above are the first two lines in the fourth and final verse.

Basically, it's a song about death, war, hate, killing, and gore all set to a lively, rockin' marching tune.