Not Since.....

   ....the days of the slave trade being legal,
and more profitable than the dreams of Croesus
has so much recent American wealth,
and once-prized scientific resources,
been laid waste to so casually by so few,
and all to such devastating world effect.

Triggers Seem To Be Everywhere Nowadays

Some are metaphorical, as in literature
which the young seem to need warnings
about what they encounter on the page,
as if reading were some risky activity
where words are weapons that have
to have safety catches put on them.

Other triggers are invisible,
and have been left hidden,
how well I remember my parents
used television as a child minder
and not knowing what I watched,
that I mistook for 'mature adult viewing'.

But the triggers that most need
a safety catch on them are those
on guns, in 'the land of the free'
where 'the right to bear arms'
is not an invite to roll up your sleeves
on sunny days, but the right,
backed by corporate gun sales advocates,
to replace the government when the citizen
wants to believe that gov't needs replacing.

However incompetent government gets
replacing it with gun based anarchy will solve nothing  

Do Countries Ever Learn From Their Pasts?

My answer to that is a very firm 'No',
particularly when they police the world
and have a sign on them which says
'Democracy for export, but not at home.'.

In the latest example of being driven by paradox 
(Republican) men in Texas have prohibited abortion,
a service in which women seek control of their bodies,
for every and any reason they want it,
not just after when they have been raped
or when the foetus will not live
and carrying it could end their lives.

This puts women who seek control of their fertility
in a similar position to the one that America
put makers of alcohol in over a hundred years ago.

We know what happened then,
the prohibition lasted thirteen years,
and continued after by criminal gangs,
who saw civil regulation and taxation
as 'against their interests' such that 
the biggest gangsters could only be caught
for laundering money and fraudulent accounting.

I look forward to women creating their own
enduring and altruistic networks
where they take care of each other
and resist the men who think they own the universe.

I look forward the slow breakdown
of contrarian patriarchal Politics from within.

 

Where God Gathers What The Fallen Spill

and as long as there is more life spilled
 than saved then there is always more
 to save in the future.

E Pluribus Unum In Suburbia

Lady Liberty invited the tired,
the poor and the huddled masses to stay.
In New York she used to give them
new English names to replace what had aged,
become unpronounceable, unspellable,
when giving fresh starts to old trades and habits.

Whatever the later public talk of 'the melting pot',
what did not happen, any more than that talk was understood,
was that each ethnic group truly blended with any other;
each new national identity renewed itself through it's old identity
in it's new suburb, via it's natural trade.
Until that area assumed the pre-Liberty identity.

Even in the land of the free, good neighbours
need the strongest of fences to be good to each other.