Songfacts®:

• When Billie Joe Armstrong wrote this politically motivated track, he was reacting to images of armored military-style vehicles in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. The Green Day frontman told Zane Lowe on Beats 1:
  
  "If I'm at a party or something like that I tend to ask a lot more questions these days instead of just trying to come up with answers. Sometimes when you're ignorant about something it's sort of a virtue because it makes you curious about what's going on. I think that's what I do in my songs. I just stay curious about what it is that I'm feeling about, whether its personal on a song like 'Still Breathing' or if it's political like a song on there called 'Say Goodbye' which is basically about a military state right in your living room."
• Teach your children well
  From the bottom of the well
  
  Armstrong contemplates here the drinking water contamination issue in Flint, Michigan. He explained to Rolling Stone: "It's thinking of Flint, Michigan, and trying to educate your kids while they're drinking toxic waste. You can't educate people if they're that desperate."