I want to share my poem with you, below, but I may be writing this preamble for myself.
Maybe I just need to remind myself of my own principles. Of what’s important. Of what matters.
Because it’s easy to lose sight of the goal, to forget the meaning of it all.
What we have witnessed over the past two decades—since the September 11 attacks, I would argue—is not simply the resurrection of Fascist impulses in the West.
What we have witnessed is a brazen, blatant consolidation of power—corporate and monied power—throughout the West and especially in the United States.
All the signs are right there, under our noses.
The growing income disparity.
The steady expansion of executive influence (as of yesterday, power with immunity from criminal prosecution).
The ongoing corporate war on health, healthcare, safety, and environmental regulation—with help from greedy, third-rate Congressmen and a cut-rate, short-sighted Supreme Court.
The theft of government offices at every level—including the un-popular Bush and Trump elections, and the stolen Supreme Court appointments.
The too-often-overlooked, catastrophic 2010 Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which treats corporations as wealthy individuals under law, giving them an unlimited ability to fund (and purchase) political campaigns as an exercise of their “individual” rights under the First Amendment. (This is a special brand of insanity.)
Centralization. Disenfranchisement. Monopoly.
Power over people. Profit over human survival. A Machiavellian, might-makes-right plunder by the very rich, abetted by the aggrieved, the resentful, the ignorant, and the fearful.
All of this leaves a substantial majority of Americans feeling confused, disenfranchised, and utterly helpless.
But when we reverse this diagnosis, when we describe the way things SHOULD be rather than they way they ARE, we find our principles…and they’re not complicated:
a functioning democracy of one-person-one-vote,
a system that limits the exploitation of the poor by the wealthy (at home and abroad), and
an emphasis on human (and environmental) concerns over the concerns of corporate boards.
Entrenched power has opposed these basic principles throughout human history, and has done so with shameless vigor in the last two decades.
As a result, Fascism is on the rise (at home and abroad), along with economic inequality, atmospheric temperatures, and sea levels.
We cannot afford to ignore what we know any longer, nor can we afford to sulk in our helplessness.
We need to be the friction in the machine. Now. By speaking out, and voting, and marching, and annoying leadership at every level, and frustrating big business, and being mindful consumers, and starving the beast as completely as we can…
…by exercising our humanity in every way—professionally, artistically, spiritually, sexually, privately and publicly—and by insisting on our rights, as humans, to be ourselves, each of us unique and each of us the same under law.
Blue and Brown
His time is cheap. His time is not cheap. The cost of his time is a dream. An ounce of blood for under twenty, the price of a half ounce of silver… He tries to keep the market in mind. He doesn’t know who’s paying, ultimately, suspects the dollars can be traced all the way back to Exxon Mobil somehow, as everything always is, up into the atmosphere, down to the ground water. He is involved in this enormity somehow. This he suspects. Rather, he knows. He is a shrinking ice floe. His time is cheap. eye floaters, carpel tunnel hemorrhoids, sciatica His grandfather lost a finger in the paper mill, or were they stitching the rivets onto blue jeans and it was severed in an industrial-strength sewing machine? He never remembers which accident left his grandfather with a stump. Their time was cheap. Most work is a mystery, some small act implicated, complicit, hidden even from himself, but worthy of blame, nevertheless. He is no longer young but still he is driven by old men, mostly men, the ones who didn’t rally or live lives of protest. Those are the ones who hold the reins. How did we fail to come to this conclusion? How did we fail to predict this end? Their time… He writes their memos, attends their meetings, translates their decisions. All day, there’s a music in his head: meta meta meta meta meta an engine with a sputter We are children and our time is cheap. So much fear about decisions when so few matter. His father would choose B or A and work his ass off until it paid. and always the locomotive rhythm meta meta meta meta meta air escaping a tire Maybe a land developer? He’s nearing the end and may never know for whom he’s racing. the promise of a first class education the economics of overpopulation the quiet fade of a forgotten generation How did we fail to come to this conclusion? His time is cheap. petrol plastics pesticides poison He remembers hoping he’d be Don DeLillo or Joe Strummer or Abbie Hoffman. His time is not cheap. An ounce of blood for under twenty, the price of a half ounce of silver… but there is nowhere else to turn. meta meta meta meta meta The cost of his time is a dream. He gets up to go home. Everyone else is gone. He puts on his jacket, leaves his computer on.