As Martin Luther King Day approaches this year, I was struck by the timelessness and timeliness of this MLK quote: Cowardice asks, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks, “Is it right?”
Please feel free to reflect upon this eternal wisdom and share this free MLK quote poster with friends and enemies alike.
Cowardice asks, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks, “Is it politic?” Vanity asks, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks, “Is it right?”
POEM: For Awe That Has Been Urned In her dreams
She is wanting
To be moved
By more than
Slumber too slumber
Mirrorly to a wake
Daze unending
With that annoying buzz
Thirst thing in the mourning
The pique ...
POEM: Navy Yard Killings Navy Yard Killings
In these crazy times
Of senseless killings
Nations seek a return
To sensible killings
There are many levels of crazy. There are perhaps even more ...
POEM: Universe So Vast I once asked God
Why did you make the universe so vast?
What were you possibly thinking?
And God said
I was kind of hoping
To have enough room
For all of the poetry yet to ...
POLITICAL POEM: Buy Partisan Ship If you knot for me
You agin
Me
Oh my
They would halve US
Believe
In a New York minute
Weather 60 second ads
Or master debating in public
For ours
To won party
Or buy ...
POEM: Ebola US Over Ebola US over
When fear metes science
When we no what too due
Still, rabidly executing our will
As wee act in sanity
Cheap as rationed rationality
Upscale absurdity
As some ...
When I was a child I crapped in my pants Today I am a king in the world Now I make others crap in their pants This is the indigestible truth Of too much power That cannot be changed Even by changing kings
Few people disagree that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Still, most people will gladly accept a little corruption, if it is backed by a little power swinging their way. Of course, corruption seems much worse if we are on the short end of it! Power is not distributed equally among humans, and those privileged to possess it, routinely wield it for their own advantage. Whether through unconscious bias and egocentricity or just plain selfishness, imbalances of power in human relationships leads to corruption. Even with good intentions, those with greater power end up molding the world into their image, at the expense of the reality of other people’s lives which are disproportionately discounted. Who of us would not want the magic wand of power to mold the world to fit our ways?
Relinquishing power is not common, and might even be considered foolish by conventional wisdom. The point is not to relinquish any and all power. The point is not to have substantially more power than others. This is rooted in recognizing that power differentials lead to human corruption; or, perhaps better put, lead to a corruption of human community. In fact, relinquishing power in order to help establish a more healthy balance of power in human relationships is a form of exercising power. This form of exercising power witnesses to an understanding of a higher power present in reality, that more egalitarian balances or power produces better humans and human community. The sad truth is that most people have more faith in fascism or other forms of concentrated power than they do in egalitarian human relationships. This is almost universally true when those with lots of power are aligned with our own particular interests. Even better yet if I am the benevolent dictator!
Large power imbalances typically result from and are maintained by violence. A relative surplus of power quite predictably leads to a lazy humanity perpetuated by force, routinely re-“making” humanity in the mold of those wielding the power. The purview of power is expediency, playing into our bias for our own ease rather than than often difficult work of building healthy human community. The natural ascendency of the masses rooted in their common and democratic (in the sense of majoritarian) everyday reality can only be put down by large power differentials driven by elites. Historically, there have been numerous rationalizations by elites to justify their minority rule over the masses. None of these rationalizations can stand as they are founded on the bankruptcy of violence. Violence is not persuasion; it is overwhelming force. Violence is what people rely on when reasonable persuasion fails. Of course, violence is persuasive in the sense that any human act carries with it the power of modeling how humans should act. However, violence does not lend itself to reasonable human relationships. Violence is the lowest form of community. It should be no surprise that violence leads to more violence. I actually like surprises! If we meet violence with non-violence, there can be some really cool surprises made possible. If we want something more than violence, the inevitable outcome of large power differentials, then we need to do something else. We can do better.
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POEM: Owed To Stormi, The Poetess It was a dark and stormy night
The starry heavens
Replaced by blinding light
Striking as lightning
Startling awe
But the bravest
From places unseen
With undeniable ...
POEM: Sow Much For Multi-tsking Hello
Hello
People looking down
As electronic devices
Looking up
Over hear
Over their
Owned buy virtual realty
Totally
Sum wear
Ails
Hole heartedly
Parting from wholly ...
POLITICAL POEM: Heir Conditioning As things went south
South goes north
Truly
Global warning is real
There is an arising
From the fires in bellies
And home fires burning
In efface of doors closed
Windows ...
POEM: Paying In Attention – Owed To Mind Fullness I under stand
You are on
Some kind of in
Stall meant plan
As long
As you still
Pay attention
In do time
I'll pay for such in deference
Hopefully not the final ...
POEM: Megabus Late The loco bus
Was barely running
Trafficking in creep after creep
At Lake & Michigan
It was sink or swim
Facing too soon departed
To be won or lost
By foot
Right, left, ...
POEM: My Brand of Value My brand value
Has plummeted recently
So says sum consultant
As some seer into my pristine hide
Speaking a bout
Clashing symbols
In the mark it place
Some limbic game how ...
The defense department denies killing civilians The state department denies human rights abuses by trade partners The department of energy denies that nuclear power is anything but safe The criminal justice system denies institutional racism The department of departments denies that it exists There is no news here An anonymous spokesman representing an undisclosed list of clients Could neither confirm nor deny their uselessness Beholden to flights of fancy Carry on Pink elephants trampling conspiracy theorists Straw men unable to eat crow Permitting no one to fly straight Barring exceptional pork The fun is over A barrel Of monkeys denying evolution Where GOP is a measle-y typo Read “take things literally” A premeditated shot in the dark Where there is no higher power Emanating from the chamber of commerce Pinko pachyderms never herd from Any rarer would be bloody Hell, the stakes are high Raised by vampires Unable to reflect on their own Fratricide from dawn to dust Sucking out the life Granting only that They feel our payin’ Attention Exacting compensation for every notice Dispatching captives with unmanned missives Droning on In their priest-like duties Until the masses are free Like a cancer An endless growth Of pulp fiction And mind-numbing doublespeak As we press release From labor camps Yet another Birth of a nation And its following deportments: REDACTED Censors monitoring your every move So your posterity is theirs And the war on terror Only coming to an end When know more Freedom to deny
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Owed to Knot Rhyming The ability to rhyme
Is not my paradigm
I brandish cacophonies
To unleash new homeys
Word
And soul full plurality
Welcoming that which can knot
Be beat
My poetry is ...
POEM: Treatment…Like…Sewage Treatment...Like...Sewage
I lived in Libertarianville
They said
"If you want sewage treatment,
Just go to some place that has it."
So I did
Many don't live there long
I ...
POEM: More of the Sane Going through life
Various docks said
You are just
Going through a phrase
And heeling
Wood be
Yores soon
Enough
Finally cured
Of awe
That is
Green
With envy
Of what ...
POEM: Past, Present, Future Past, Present, Future
The past is the foundation from which we build
The shoulders we stand upon
The inventory of experience stored for our convenience
The pool of wisdom ...
POEM: Their Undoing They control the levers
Of a vast machinery
Of business, politics, education
They know no equals
Fusing work and ploy
Blind to their match
Game and set
Unable even to ...
POEM: A Corny Poem — Owed To Iowa He was feeling it
In a corny state
The mother of corn starch
In the thick of it
A sweet mother
High on fructose
Full of it
As lots of feed
In feedlots
Of walking ...
POEM: Running Like Chickens With Their Heads Cut Off
Have you ever looked a chicken in the eyes? Most of us city folk probably never have Where are you? Chickens can look quite different in the city Just the same Their bodies run around Like death will catch up with them if they slow down Their heads flit about Ensnared by nothing at all Abiding mirror fax of life Who has got one’s back? Missing only you, won’s greatest faux Possessed by a vacancy That will soon enough be dismissed Wading for something more Unable to see what’s beneath their own feat Where we are grounded Still, six feet is better than two When it’s not yours! As if one May fly! To live but for one day Today Even four proves oddly better Fore what can thou dust do, in turn? Don’t you see?! Chickens re-member!? They are almost everywhere Though they are practically invisible where I live So I am bound to run into more than a few Even more so if you cross to the other side Just, please, don’t bother asking me why I must Have chickens Incite me To a whirl Without Chickens Running about With their heads Just being Cut off Like trafficking enflesh
I wrote this poem a while back, but thought that it might be a good poem for the month of May, given the reference to the short-lived May fly. Nonetheless, this poem fits on a long-standing theme, particularly for those living in Western civilization, of busyness and not being present in the moment. Like many of my poems, you may have to read it several times, because it involves a lot of puns and multiple meanings depending on how you read various phrases. It’s difficult for me to comment on longer poems, because I end up commenting way, way longer than the poem itself. Sometimes I like to leave the poems to speak for themselves. Still, I think it’s probably comment on one strain in this poem. The phrase: Still, six feet is better than two is a reference to being buried 6 feet underground and a reference to a chicken with its head cut off lying on the ground looking at the 6 feet of three other chickens and taking some small comfort that it is not their two feet that they see in their last moment of life. Also, this is an allusion to the apparent ease at which we will trade other people’s lives for our own. If you find this somewhat morbid, then take some comfort in the line: Even four proves oddly better. In our fixation on the quantitative in our culture, it might seem odd that four is actually better than six. However, the four refers to two sets of feet and a pair of chickens or people. This refers to the comfort that we find in companionship with one another. This value of companionship strikes a sharp contrast to the hurried busyness that tramples our presence of any given moment, and rushes by authentic relationships with others. In this crazy world, which may seem dangerous and short at times, especially if you are chicken, companionship and solidarity may prove to be the reason or purpose in our lives. I guess the message is: pay attention to the people around you. Oh yeah, you may want to pay attention to the chickens around you as well.
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POEM: Quiet the View Hope
Was
Present
On the horizon
South
East
West
North
into the fabric of existence
Be not afraid
Weather
Looking up
Looking down
Such peek experiences
Are awe ways ...
POEM: Colloquial He 1. He lived
2. In a particular time
3. In a particular place
And one
Of his many editors
Proferred the generic claim
Putting fourth
That he rote
Colloquially
And to this ...
POEM: Crime Novel 45 caliber opening lines for a crime novel:
Jack Manchester was the kind of a guy
Who would pray for the day he could swear on his mother's grave
And if you ever suspected that ...
POEM: Nobodies Prefect Anarchists know
Nobodies
Prefect
In a dyslexic god eat god whirled
As upside
Down
With community
As right side
Up
With lords of all sorts
Anarchists no
Aiming too ...
POEM: The Lost Heart of Wore Dave lost his head
On the edge of barbarism
Shariq found his blown to pieces
On the edge of civilization
Savage swordplay and droning videogames
Medieval meets modern
Death ...
This cool design is linked to a button, but other great Top Pun products like T-shirts, bumper stickers, mugs, caps, key chains, magnets, posters, and sticker sheets can be accessed by scrolling down the product page.
This funny quote from Napoleon Bonaparte is particularly funny since Napoleon certainly had many encounters with all types of politicians, so he should know. While I don’t think that intelligence is necessarily associated with politics, I think that a deficiency of certain types of wisdom is widespread. Politics is fraught with expediency and compromise. This marginalizes other ways of living and relating to one another. Ironically, the quest to triangulate thousands of expedient compromises, even with the intent to preserve and enhance human life, invariably degrades our collective humanity and individual worth in relation to the body politic. This is another case of vainly seeking to achieve certain ends by means incompatible with those ends. This necessarily disconnects the natural order of things, that means and ends are connected; and when the connection between means and ends is severed, the meta-message is that life (or politics) doesn’t make sense and that sensible solutions to community problems are irrelevant. This state of affairs continues because sensibility is not the primary concern, rather, it is power. Power can be wielded sensibly, but power has the “privilege” of operating insensibly, according to its own whim or interest. One does not have to have intelligence to wield power, therefore stupidity is not a handicap in politics, the wielding of power in relation to others. A wisdom that views means and ends as inseparable needs to face the difficult work of forging a way that is far less expedient. If we didn’t negotiate away (compromise) human rights regularly, then large-scale human endeavors would require an even larger scale of work necessary to preserve human rights. This is a primary reason why I see anarchism and its critique of large-scale enterprises as so important to understanding the large-scale dehumanizing forces in Western civilization. If we were committed to healthy human relationships, we would not engage in large-scale enterprises which run over human rights. Of course, this is seen as impracticable or unattainable; thus, the pervasive sense that individuals or small groups cannot make a difference. This fatalism is a logical read of the logic inherent in these larger systems. The systems do NOT value you. That’s because valuing you has been so compromised out of the system. People become means, not ends. Invariably, when people are treated as means rather than ends, they are treated meanly, like so much building material in the dreams of others who wield more power. For better or worse, the only way out of this seems to be the masses rising up with their own inherent power derived from their will and consent and overthrow the dehumanizing powers that be. Now, this takes more than wisdom; this requires courage! I encourage you to rage against the machine. I encourage you to live in ways that inspire others to fully live and not compromise themselves as they internalize and model so well the compromising of others inherent in modern politics. To live free is not a guarantee that you “win” (as in the conventional wisdom), but to center your living around the fact that being free is winning. Live free or die. The second comes to all of us. The first is optional.
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POEM: Stage Coach Stage Coach
One day
I lost my script
And was taken back
Only to have scene
The other actors
Guise
Now
In the audience
Having won
More stage
Contracted
This is a ...
POEM: The Autobiography of Tao Rex The opening lines
Of the autobiography
Of Tao Rex
Alias Not Neil:
Neil was a man of substance
Who was not waiting
For it to come into style
If in the course of life
He ...
POEM: Awe That Is Fine Her Sheez
Know more than
Know less than
Then any won ails
In whatever
Whirled
Privileged to breathe at awe
Fenced buy abets
Dis regarding
Weather grate her
Or less her
As ...
POEM: Owed to Racism – That Whole In Our Soul Owed to Racism: That Whole In Our Soul
Our life is
A thin line between
Loving hate
And hope filled madness
Dark mournings
And over joy
In this may hem together
To suture ...
POEM: A Ledged Fall The leaf let go
Releasing awe that had given it life
In what could have bin
A swan dive
Or a butterfly prancing
But it was doing its own thing
Lining up for know one
Little ...
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In Politics Stupidity Is Not a Handicap
In Politics Stupidity Is Not a Handicap–FUNNY PEACE QUOTE BUTTON
In Politics Stupidity Is Not a Handicap–FUNNY PEACE QUOTE BUTTON
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View more Peace Quote Buttons.
This funny quote from Napoleon Bonaparte is particularly funny since Napoleon certainly had many encounters with all types of politicians, so he should know. While I don’t think that intelligence is necessarily associated with politics, I think that a deficiency of certain types of wisdom is widespread. Politics is fraught with expediency and compromise. This marginalizes other ways of living and relating to one another. Ironically, the quest to triangulate thousands of expedient compromises, even with the intent to preserve and enhance human life, invariably degrades our collective humanity and individual worth in relation to the body politic. This is another case of vainly seeking to achieve certain ends by means incompatible with those ends. This necessarily disconnects the natural order of things, that means and ends are connected; and when the connection between means and ends is severed, the meta-message is that life (or politics) doesn’t make sense and that sensible solutions to community problems are irrelevant. This state of affairs continues because sensibility is not the primary concern, rather, it is power. Power can be wielded sensibly, but power has the “privilege” of operating insensibly, according to its own whim or interest. One does not have to have intelligence to wield power, therefore stupidity is not a handicap in politics, the wielding of power in relation to others. A wisdom that views means and ends as inseparable needs to face the difficult work of forging a way that is far less expedient. If we didn’t negotiate away (compromise) human rights regularly, then large-scale human endeavors would require an even larger scale of work necessary to preserve human rights. This is a primary reason why I see anarchism and its critique of large-scale enterprises as so important to understanding the large-scale dehumanizing forces in Western civilization. If we were committed to healthy human relationships, we would not engage in large-scale enterprises which run over human rights. Of course, this is seen as impracticable or unattainable; thus, the pervasive sense that individuals or small groups cannot make a difference. This fatalism is a logical read of the logic inherent in these larger systems. The systems do NOT value you. That’s because valuing you has been so compromised out of the system. People become means, not ends. Invariably, when people are treated as means rather than ends, they are treated meanly, like so much building material in the dreams of others who wield more power. For better or worse, the only way out of this seems to be the masses rising up with their own inherent power derived from their will and consent and overthrow the dehumanizing powers that be. Now, this takes more than wisdom; this requires courage! I encourage you to rage against the machine. I encourage you to live in ways that inspire others to fully live and not compromise themselves as they internalize and model so well the compromising of others inherent in modern politics. To live free is not a guarantee that you “win” (as in the conventional wisdom), but to center your living around the fact that being free is winning. Live free or die. The second comes to all of us. The first is optional.
Check Out These Cool RELATED POSTS:
Stage Coach One day I lost my script And was taken back Only to have scene The other actors Guise Now In the audience Having won More stage Contracted This is a ...
The opening lines Of the autobiography Of Tao Rex Alias Not Neil: Neil was a man of substance Who was not waiting For it to come into style If in the course of life He ...
Most days I resist. Today, I cannot resist. Please enjoy this free political poster, adding to the surreal self-parody of Donald Trump: Prez Donald Trump - A Very Stable ...
Sheez Know more than Know less than Then any won ails In whatever Whirled Privileged to breathe at awe Fenced buy abets Dis regarding Weather grate her Or less her As ...
Owed to Racism: That Whole In Our Soul Our life is A thin line between Loving hate And hope filled madness Dark mournings And over joy In this may hem together To suture ...
The leaf let go Releasing awe that had given it life In what could have bin A swan dive Or a butterfly prancing But it was doing its own thing Lining up for know one Little ...