In the last bust up of this great American machine we knew what they wanted us to know. Our access to information limited by the scope of our immature understanding of communication technology.
Back then black ink and the whispers on the radio that were half heard and half understood through the skips and scrapes told the story. Question is what’s the excuse now? As predators rise and storm the gates, the masses suspended in a sort of comfortable paralysis that comes from perhaps being overfed the information that we once thirsted for, what is the excuse?
You can’t doubt that we are under attack. Sure some numbers are on the decline, but others are frozen, halted like they fell into a bucket of Blackstrap and things that were sturdy, things that were monuments to past social wars now find themselves in front of the chisel and the wrecking ball. The vital threads of our already insufficient safety net now threatened by the sharp blades that sit in eager hands.
All of it reads like the field report from a war that were losing. Filled with details on an invasion that is re-shaping us into some sort of servant class, this bent and scratched thing that moves only on command, the Morlocks to their Eloi.
What becomes of those who stand up in resistance to this perversion of America and what we aspire to be? Who saves the day when salvation is out of our fingers reach and we are unable to grow longer fingers, unable to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps because a foreclosed house sits down on top of us waiting for the air to be pressed away?
Some of us that are down here in the black still look up waiting for a dash of light, a hand from those splendid things that used to recognize the very human thread that connected us all. A collection of my brothers and my sisters, sprung from their slumber.
After all we can all see what’s going on in full vibrant color on every conceivable device, in our pockets, on our wall, everywhere 24/7. The tale must be known by now and yet suffering remains and a gaggle of broken men and women work and push to survive. Armies holding tight to the frail bits of us that break off, all trying to not get murdered by suicide and the other bear traps that spring up down here.
Life and death, real and tangible horror all before the half shut, half dazed eyes of a nation that has fallen silent because it suits them to remain silent until it darkens their door. And so to them I speak.
Sure some of you are un-breathed upon by this roving monster, safe in your bunkers, surrounded by the easily pierced walls of distraction that we've all put up only to learn how fragile they truly are. But while you may think that you’re immune, moving through these days as if, to borrow a phrase, you were inoculated from the disease of devastation, well you are as mistaken as one can be.
You can fade to nothing in this country, starve, and shiver. A kid can go hungry same as a grown man can and you can move from being a victim to a villain at the snap of a finger, move from that version of yourself that you’ve always known to a version of yourself that makes others recoil. You can fall off the face of this earth, become homeless and turn back to discover the absence of breadcrumbs, the absence of a way back. A solid turned into a smoke that breaks up into the air rendering it unseen, and eventually unremembered.
You can find this hell re-occurring on a loop same as so many others have and will, you can wake up to it and then you can watch as those on high question the validity of your suffering as if they knew a damn thing about what the air down here tastes like.
You can wake up to that or you can wake up now, stand, and push back with peaceful resistance against this heaving beast.
This isn’t a call for you to give a dime, certainly isn’t a call for you to give a life, it’s just a call for you to give a damn.
