This is slightly revised from the spoken word/music video https://youtu.be/JNzj3aQMuLY
Towards the end of 2020
I started on this verse.
Things were starting to look better
But would soon be looking worse.
New insights I was gaining
From the counseling profession
Were helping me unravel
All the conflict and aggression.
Yet completion’s proved elusive;
The quatrains keep on forming.
Another headline fades to history.
The planet keeps on warming.
So it’s now or never, though I’m
Far as ever from perfection.
I just hope you somewhere here will find
Words worthy of reflection. . .
Is it knowledge or brash certainty?
The commentator asked,
Standing in the pond at Auschwitz;
One half century has since passed.
Today, it’s said division
Is increasing with each year.
There may be two sides but likely
Just one heart, beset by fear.
Which fear, of course, depends upon
Just who or where we are.
Protections we may have in place,
So not to slip as far.
Some fear flooding, some wildfires,
Raging wounded men in blue,
Fear of automatic rounds
Aimed at the supermarket queue.
Fear of malnutrition
When your farmland has grown bare,
Fear of respiratory illness
When you cannot breathe the air.
A barrage of guided missiles
That make one fear the sky,
Fear of showing weakness
In spite of who may die.
Fearing Great Replacement,
Fearing violent overthrow,
With systems more in chaos
Than a Punch & Judy show.
Just who is it we will find in that
Stage wagon, painted red?
He’s called Punchman; but we see
Just his puppets, not his head.
The puppets act out stories
That become our public myths,
Shape our haloed institutions,
Build the marble monoliths.
While the puppet speaks sarcastic lines
That seem to empathize,
The puppeteer starts testing
The crowd’s tolerance for lies.
Repeating them until they’re “facts,”
Defying true perception,
Presuming the beleaguered have
Survived on self-deception.
Calling whistle-blowers “terrorists,”
Indicted without proof,
While towards those truly wreaking terror
He’s typically aloof.
By owning major news outlets
Throughout the world and nation,
Where most discuss the issues
He controls the conversation.
Wherever we spend money
He is there to get his cut.
He is Blackrock. He is Vanguard,
Long immune to antitrust.
Punchman cannot stop to think of
The ones whose lives he harms
When for profit and prestige
The veins are screaming in his arms.
One might think that for his children
Or their children he might ponder
The planet they’ll inherit
That he’s worked full-time to squander.
Instead Joker’s incarnation,
With painted grin as crass,
Parades through Gotham City,
His float spewing poison gas.
If he convinces you progressives
Are the ones who spell your doom,
Can they then still be the last adults
Still left in the room?
And if resolved asylum seekers
Have caused your loss of wages
Will you feel him pick your pocket,
Or hear children cry from cages?
Punchman busts up unions,
Targets those who immigrate,
Insists the ones who love America
Are the ones who share his hate.
It’s in his interests to promote
Whatever crisis that encumbers
A battered outraged people
From gathering in numbers.
Debts and fees restrain us,
In accord with his design,
And drain us of the strength we need
To join a picket line.
He tells working whites they’re chosen,
While he loots their meager wealth.
Equating “freedom” with a disconnected
Life of serving self.
Freedom . . . to strip the land
And not pay any tax,
Freedom . . . to ban the truth
And ridicule the facts,
Freedom . . . to let your carbon
Footprint fill up craters.
Freedom . . . to emulate
The infamous dictators.
Defend freedom of religion,
Grounds to hijack education.
Declare freedom for polluters
To destroy all God’s creation.
Whose right to endless profiting
Was granted him at birth?
The child who lacked for nothing,
Except inherent worth.
Whichever be the symbols
We attach our freedom to,
When extolled on social media,
Coagulate like glue.
The authors of the algorithms
Know well what makes us tick.
The manipulated brain
Tells the finger, “one more click.”
Tailoring the content
To a smouldering obsession.
Like to a substance, a disease
Which has its own progression.
Some will get the patient parent,
Who shows how to problem-solve
Without invoking threats and violence,
When conflict is involved.
But it’s different for the children
Whose dad rarely spared the rod.
They don’t learn to negotiate,
But keep up a facade.
In this narrative of upsmanship,
An egocentric tale,
You get ahead by causing
The more principled to fail.
Those who grow up in turmoil,
Their attachment insecure,
Are left to seek out on their own
What can be known for sure.
Embracing a plain narrative
That casts out shades of grey,
There being no one to co-regulate
Them through a stressful day.
When she is the baby crying,
Without parent to console,
Will she one day learn to trust
And not need full control?
And if his father’s fragile ego
Forces him to feel less-than,
How does that shape his sense
Of what it means to be a man?
Whether the receiver
Or deliverer of taunts,
Most won’t see when their actions
Are in fact trauma response.
When the bullied seek revenge–
Their mal-adaptive quest to heal–
Inside old wounds are festering
They’ve been trying to conceal.
If theirs be a family who depends
On blind loyalty,
The tribe’s only there to back them
Until they disagree.
Those witnessing the hanging tree,
Learn somehow to condone,
And dare not speak out from the heart
Through fear of being disowned,
Harbored by a faith that values
Those most willing to obey,
When the charismatic human
Claims to know what God would say.
When identity gets threatened
All means justify the ends.
Start talking like the other side
You’ll soon be losing friends.
We might not even notice when,
Or what we’re looking for,
The day we get conscripted
To fight the culture war.
Predisposed to feel resentful
And robbed of dignity
When those targeted by racism
Gain public sympathy.
Passing down through generations
A need for keeping numb,
And to ban the actual story
From the school curriculum.
Well yes, you look the other way
If science comes demanding,
When your living depends upon
That lack of understanding.
Make sacrifices for your children,
Send them to the finest schools,
While you pawn away their future
Aggrandizing fossil fuels.
Blank checks go to your lobbyists
Who wink then, with a smile,
Fork that hay to corporate livestock
Grazing both sides of the aisle.
Three hundred head of cattle
Stampede toward the bank;
With a Boeing or Chevron logo
Branded to each flank.
Well informed of coming mergers
Senate cowboys from their mounts,
Can’t stop grinning as the proceeds
Bloat their personal accounts.
Though the Swedish teen Cassandra,
Worked so valiantly to wake
The traders and insiders
From a dissociative state.
The cancer deaths from Roundup,
The opioid overdoses:
See the company obfuscators
Negate victims’ diagnosis.
One G.E. chief exec
From the eighties raised the bar
For worker deprivation.
Others soon dared go as far.
Now is Punchman that C.E.O.,
In Forbes celebrated,
Or a ecocidal system
Recklessly de-regulated?
Was that system ever scrupulous
Playing fair, above the belt?
Or is a Nazi-playbook demagogue
Its inevitable result?
Meanwhile in the Oval Office,
Some will come to question why.
Watch Deep State step in to tell them
Just what rules they must play by.
Then are Punchman and Deep State
One and the same behind that curtain?
Those who go back there don’t return;
So no one’s truly certain.
How does one win election
Representing one percent?
You can subvert the process,
Certain not to be out-spent.
While talking gun and fetal rights,
Entitlements, taxation,
You masquerade as working class
Though your world’s the plantation.
Where tax-sheltered oligarchs
Get their own jet or rocket.
All the inmates and war dead
Existed just to fill your pocket.
In fact, call yourself “pro-life,”
Though your profits come from death
And impoverishing children,
Once they’ve taken their first breath.
Ending up the hopeless youth
Who buy your AR-15s.
You won’t get charged with murder
Where you lurk behind the scenes.
And simply disenfranchise voters
Who don’t share your beliefs.
Then you cry, "election stolen,"
While actually, you’re the thief.
The Federalist Society
Supplies you ideologues,
Black robes for who ambition leads
To wait on first-class hogs.
Get it down to just three justices
Plus six lifetime infiltrates
Who simply transfer rights from humans
To your companies and states.
And you won’t have to worry
About votes the left can muster
For the bills you find displeasing
When you have the filibuster.
There’ll be no checks, no balances,
Your powers undebated,
A scheme when fully realized
Is a people subjugated.
Once I would have found the words here
Too unsettling to believe,
But in time the myths I’d clung to
One by one came due to grieve.
I grieve for the indigenous
By disease and rifles killed,
My forebears’ cellar holes dug out
In ground their blood was spilled.
Those I fancied freedom fighters,
Of seventeen-seventy-six,
Were simply bent on building their own wealth
Through slaves and politics.
I grieve for all the soldiers
Who sacrificed to serve,
When the system they fought to defend
Kicked them to the curb.
I grieve the land protectors
Stabbed by corporate thugs.
Grieve the private prisons quotas
With the code-name War on Drugs.
I grieve for the enslaved and lynched,
The cruel construct of race,
By Christians lacking eyes to see
The Christ in every face.
Sitting down to eat I grieve
The souls who daily face starvation,
Deserving nothing less than I
So privileged by location.
My first president warned his nation
Of the weapon-sellers’ malice.
And when the next came to de-escalate
He wound up dead in Dallas.
It was supposed to be Chicago,
CIA’s recruit had warned,
His last words: “I’m just the patsy!”
His TV death unmourned.
One million Viets forced South from North
Bred conflict 'tween sharecroppers;
Clandestinely a market built
To sell twelve thousand choppers.
Arms merchants ever confident
That Congress could spend more
Had the Gulf of Tonkin staged
To get their full-scale war.
I grieve the reverend, the poet, the candidate,
Their true assassins never seen,
For them and all those who spoke out
Against our war machine.
Was it the year of “Helter Skelter”
That Deep State was in its prime?
Emboldened by what it
Got away with that first time?
I grieve for climate refugees
Who used to till the soil
Now caked and dry and wasted
By our dance of death with oil.
I grieve the military dollars,
Fifty-seven K per second,
Destroying lives and habitat—
Not by their ledger reckoned.
They who could have stopped extinction,
With their endless spending power,
Instead bombed Muslim nations
Three times every hour.
Supposing we compared our values,
Had a humble conversation?
Might that free our shackled hearts
From bias confirmation?
Have you lived among the wealthy,
And not felt the need to share?
Or can you teach me how to survive
When grocery shelves go bare?
Has the class system held you hostage,
Left you missing true connection?
Does your soul pine for that day
You drop it all in the collection?
Did you march with ten thousand
Chanting “El Pueblo unido…”
While above in office suites
They plot to keep us dividido?
Were you sold by bounty hunters
To fill Guantanamo,
Yet have come to be a source of hope
Regardless where you go?
Our revels now are ended,
Though few yet understand
That Punchman claims it’s all about
Supplying our demand.
We don’t even have five years left
To reset the carbon clock.
We’ve ignored the Knowledge Keepers
Making pleas from Standing Rock.
You who grew up nurtured by the earth–
The mother of us all,
Who’s treating us now as we’ve treated her,
In spite of warning calls.
Did your people’s first encounter
With those driven to possess
Leave you startled at their enterprising
Lack of humbleness?
All refugees from foreign lands
Where naught they could survive;
Is not their common origin
Some place we colonized?
My ancestors were Vikings
Who sacked the Emerald Isle.
They were the starving Irish—
As immigrants, deemed vile.
On whose backs came some to prosper,
To ride a limousine?
How’d exploitation become Christian
With the age of Constantine?
It’s time to find our gratitude
For time we have been given,
Learn what’s ours to sacrifice for lands
And waters that keep living.
With no latitudes remaining to
Escape extremes of weather,
We could perish each in solitude
Or we could act together.
