That's a good song Mark. Here something I did a few years back, from the same kind of feelings:

Ballade of Moderate Compassion

Poor Mrs Brown is sick and tired and old,
And Mr Jones is muddled in his brain,
And Mary's child is crying in the cold,
and John is sleeping in the wind and rain;
they look for rescue, but they look in vain.
No lifebelt comes, instead these words are hurled:
"Your case is hard, but no good to complain -
we are not living in A Perfect World."

You longed for sea and sands of shining gold,
you booked your holiday in Sunny Spain -
you should have gone by train, but you were told
"It's quicker and more pleasant on the plane".
A slight diversiion took you to Bahrein,
with blackened sands, where stinking oilslicks swirled,
you watch the seagulls down, and you explain
"We are not living in aA Perfect World."

The sky grows dark, the world is bought and sold.
Christ on his cross dies for his own again;
the shepherd falls, the wolf is in the fold,
and all around are cries of grief and pain.
You measure out your pity grain by grain,
your neat umbrella is so tightly furled.
In face of agony, your tired refrain -
"We are not living in A Perfect World."

Prince of a thousand forms that measure pain,
your comfortable lips in judgement curled,
God knows you'd not be here, that much is plain
if we were living in A Perfect World.

17th April 1993

Here is a note I wrote about this at the time:A ballade about complacent bureaucracy in "the caring professions" and elsewhere. I was a Social Worker for 20 years, and the phrase that always made my gorge rise was when colleagues (especially "senior colleagues") started saying things like "in an ideal world".

A phrase like that should of course indicate someone is going to explore the deep mysteries of life and death and tragedy. But in practice all it meant is that once again some poor "client" was going to get screwed by the system, and noone was going to make waves about it.

Rule of thumb - if a social worker or a politician says "in an ideal world" they aren't going to help. If they say "in a decent society" there's a chance they might. But what you really want is someone who believes that "No" is not an answer, it's just a negotiating position.