The Trickle Up Effect

is as old as The Fall.
As old as men press-ganged
by rulers to serve as soldiers
and sailors since ancient times.
As Control descends to the leaders
of the new global industrial base
I am pained when I (rarely) observe
factory workers making products
they would like but their wages
will never afford, in a hierarchy
they will never see the top of.

Farming started that hierarchy
10,000 years ago, reinventing animals
and plants as loss-leaders to support
an ever-expanding human population,
Reducing everything in it's path.
Before farming the more things changed
the more they could change again,
the more the change was accepted
and change was merely change
not measured growth or shrinkage.

After the world was farmed,
the more everything changed
the more it shrank. Even now
we think it a triumph that we
can measure the shrinkage.