POEM: Wee Civil Lies: They Brutalize

We are prone
Too civil lies
The most savage saving
Buy brutal lies
As assuredly
As they had
Been stood up
Just the same
For their own
Good
Won morality for us
None for them
Hidden as mirror
Human eyes
Unsettling
The score
One love

Violence - The Cause and Solution to All of Our Problems PEACE BUTTONThis poem is about the violence we unleash in the name of the state and nationalism against stateless violence that is often referred to as terrorism.  War is terrorism with a bigger budget.  War on terrorism is a shock and awe full escalation of violence seeking to end violence with more violence.  This poem is about the profound egocentrism that is scaled up to nationalism and exclusivist patriotism.  When we add our ignorance of “foreign” humans to the crucible of our own fears, we conjure demons.  A nation of partisans is blind to humanity.

The man who speaks of the enemy is the enemy himself. Bertolt Brecht quote PEACE BUTTONWe prefer to believe that humans living in other nations and cultures somehow operate disconnected, even psychotically, from a cause-and-effect world.  “They” are aliens, or more literally, not human.  Their grievous experiences are viewed as illegitimate, or simply self-inflicted (unlike ours).  Justice becomes just US.  We are good; they are evil.  We go long with the whores of war in a costly and feudal tempt to psychologically project our own evil onto distant others and militarily project our own lust for power and, of coarse, its ostensible security.  Our “way of life” is inescapably intertwined with our “way of death.”  This ever-popular though pathetic avoidance of assenting to the oneness of humanity is an epic failure to own up to the costs of love.  Hate and fear are cheaper, like that cheap plastic crap from China.  Why Is It Always US versus Them PEACE BUTTONWithout disposable people, the gears of imperialism and capitalism would grind to a halt in a heart-wrenching imperative to honor every human right.  A so-called civilization built around planned obsolescence and cancerous growth rejects, not surprisingly, the priceless sanctity of every human life which would mandate a firewall to the carnage of war.  Human rights would go one better than human wrongs.  But at what accost?  Probably much less than war, but the distribution of pain would be much different.  By attending to our own shadow side, we preempt extracting the cost of our own evil from others.  Anything War Can Do Peace Can Do Better PEACE BUTTONOf course, this costs us — please note that morality is incurring a cost of one’s own, thereby demarcating what we value.  Further, a healthy human being replete with love goes even further to absorb some of humanity’s cost from less healthy humans, thereby incarnating the example of love.  This is the opposite of war, and, ultimately, the only scoring that matters.  Love perpetually extends humanity to each and every human, not amputating human rights to those who don’t happen to be at hand.  For badder or worse, love will piss off virtually every in-group of which you are a part.  In-group members reliably err on their own privilege over out-group members.  Human equality is necessarily revolutionary.  	 If we were willing to pay the same price for peace that we pay for war, we'd have peace today PEACE BUTTONLove and justice kiss when we sacrifice in-group privilege toward securing human rights for all.

May we know the score that is love, demolishing war-making.

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