Poem: News from the Home Front

We learned this week that being the Governor of California requires extraordinary quotients

of shamelessness. Jerry Brown is not embarrassed to be the Prison Industry’s boy in Sacramento, and so

we should not be embarrassed to have elected him to lead us and protect us

from druggies, who Brown prefers to leave behind bars, the better to improve the bottom line

of his patrons in the Incarceration Business.

We learned this week that slavery still flourishes in India. The old-fashioned kind 

of slavery, in which children are sold like cattle, sacred cows who labor with opposable thumbs. This kind of thing

happens, you know, so we should not be embarrassed to organize our life around acquiring and consuming

goods and services

brought to us by nicely remunerated slave drivers.

When you can’t see the harm that you’re doing, the harm seems not to exist. Look at your screen. Focus there. You’ll be distracted into innocence.

Or look to the sun, into the blazing white. Or at the moon, the same moon slaves of yore gazed up at, searching for deliverance.

Or should you wish to revolt, to reject the accepted and acceptable imperative to get and to spend, to demean and exploit, to win, to live in “abundance,” to own someone else —

in that case, you could look inward.