Does illness have a voice,and if so; is it melancholy,or dark and dank, divulgingdeepest despair, or revealinga vileness of nature? Discord creeps along my veins,disrupts muscles, systems failingunder the oppression –“Stay strong,” friends counsel,cannot hear the gathering storm,feel the heaviness cloaking me. I am not myself, but then;who am I? Is disease a mutationof the […]
Discharge the gun –protection a vesselthrough which our depthsare undefined…adrift Fear is a burrowerwears a false crownbirths losstrusts danger Hearts beg,amid this trigger-readinessfor a guardian – unafraidto court this meaningless Futility unchecked –to study productive optionsunimaginable in the current state of chaos on repeat. (Art my own)
These bones, they saywill finish me – too brittleto withstand the race But I am Willowrecollection wispymy dance defiant Porous as a sea spongesoaking up each daymettle despite the rattle (Tuesdays I borrow from Twitter @Vjknutson. Image my own.)
Really worrisome is the seemingly innate/reactive human tendency towards adversarial perceptions of ‘others’ or ‘them’ based on superficial traits, especially colour, foreign language and/or religious wear.
Sometimes I muse, what humankind may need to suffer in order to survive the long term—indeed from ourselves!—is an even greater nemesis (perhaps a multi-tentacled ET?) than our own politics of difference, against which we could all unite, attack and defeat—all during which we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and witness just how humanly similar we are to each other.
Still, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, are we not likely to inevitably revert to the same typical politics of scale to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone; from the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal?
Hypothetically, reduce our species to just a few city blocks of residents who are similar in every way and eventually there may still be some sort of bitter inter-neighbourhood quarreling.
Nonetheless, as a species, we must keep trying our best to (at the very least) behave civilly towards those we perceive as different from us.
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There is truth in what you say. We seem to need an enemy or scapegoat. Recently, I heard a socialist explain that we are 200 years away from equality – the number of years it would take to eliminate the old order. Still we plod on. Thanks for your remarks.
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With the growing wealth gap and big business gaining greater advantage over the worker, I don’t see how very much can be realistically gained by the little guy, even through a social pendulum shift.
Unlike with a few social/worker revolutions of the past, notably the Bolshevik and French revolutions, it seems to me that contemporary Western world’s virtual corporate rule (a corp-ocracy?) and superfluously wealthy essentially have the police and military ready to foremost protect big power and money interests, even over the food and shelter needs of the protesting masses.
It could be excused as busting heads to maintain law and order as a priority.
Thus the absurdly unjust inequities and inequalities can persist.
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I agree with, Liz, that is a thought-provoking quote. Unfortunately, racism is ingrained in some folk through several generations and the mindset is hard to change.
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What I find disconcerting is the people who say: “Surely it’s not a problem here.” Dig deeper people!
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Yes, they don’t think out of the box because they have tunnel vision.
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That’s a very thought-provoking quote. It shines a new light on how systemic rascism continues to thrive.
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Exactly. Thanks for that Liz. We need to get out of comfort zone to understand the depths I’m afraid.
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You’re welcome, V.J.
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