As man expired His last Once agin Mother Nature breathed in A parent excrement Concrete and steel Leaving not Even a scratch In geologic time Merely having caught a cold Cold virus Feverish bout Something to sneeze about Un-till returning To natural appetites Where awe is better than knew In the tree of knowledge With wisdom of what can and cannot be forest Upon Mother Nature
Ultimately, this poem is a testament to the sustaining and healing power of Mother Nature. So many times I am struck by the unsustainable practices of so-called civilization. While I am not confident that humankind (unkind?) will be able to avert a monumental collapse of civilization as we know it today, I suspect that humans will survive in some form. Similarly, I strongly suspect than nature will survive. I suspect that humans are not smart enough, nor stupid enough, to end life on this planet. I suspect that humans are not strong enough, nor weak enough, to end life on this planet. While our blind greed is frighteningly persistent, this poem is one vision of Mother Nature, quite naturally, recovering from a virus and fever, and returning to health. Mother Nature is awesome and powerful. In this envisioned scenario, humans don’t make it, at least not in any form resembling our current civilization. In the first line of the poem, I reference the word “man” as expiring, that is, lowercase man, not humankind. I snuck this in as an opening to survive, if in fact, in the yin and yang of life, the patriarchal male force is brought into balance with the nurturing/healing female force. I don’t think that it is any accident that nature, Mother Nature, is typically viewed as female across many human cultures. If we don’t respect females, then we are doomed to an existence far short of our awesome potential, or, perhaps, simply doomed to extinction. May we as a species, one among many, find a balance befitting the awesome benevolence of Mother Nature.
POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
JUST FOR THE HEALTH OF IT: Public Health Radio Show on WAKT 106.1 FM Toledo JUST FOR THE HEALTH OF IT: Public Health Radio Show on WAKT 106.1 FM Toledo Just for the Health of It is my weekly half-hour public health show on WAKT, 106.1 FM Toledo. You can listen at 9:00 AM Tuesdays and Thursdays (after Democracy NOW) on-air or on-line ToledoRadio.org. To listen anytime you want online, […]...
POEM: Breath of Fresh Heir Each mourning Brings that which is light Though wanting to rest As the whirled spins under my feet I am Still Razed Too my feat Standing on Perhaps a singular word Mysteriously helled Together In God-ordained gravity Until that thirst Breath of fresh heir As awe is knew This poem is about coming out of […]...
The economy was Humming Having change Their tune Given The overabundance Of hot water And cell a-steam Showering down Hour earthly reign In the scheme of things In a call amity Of biblical portions They had everything Save the earth And after Having one Wore on the environment Mother earth’s Pursed lips At the outpouring cache A river bed Tried to the bone Of no use Pointing fingers As more than Putting up With money where mouth is Re: tardily sane As never too be Ever food agin Mouthing a mint In perpetual bad taste Sow un-full Filling a void That wee only have Won planet Wont of reign
Yet another poem mourning the way we treat our beloved Mother Earth. As global warning wrings out more lost species, extinct forever in the wake of our mindless consumption and heartless capitalism, I am reminded wince again of the Cree Indian prophecy: “Only when the last tree has been felled, the last river poisoned and the last fish caught, man will know, that he cannot eat money.” Can you help but ask weather when we put our money where our mouth is if it will be too late. If mama ain’t happy, nobody’s happy. If mankind can’t let go of the crappy job he’s doing, mama will get unrule he Let us not temp our mother.
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POEM: Innocence — An Owed In A Sense Her innocence Was immune to their dis ease As be wilder And a tempt However tempered Only to be Dis missed As just A guile His innocence Deified awe bravery In the face Of accusations summoned As subdude As never a cur to them Posing the quest in Guise will Be guise Her bosom leaped […]...
Bee The change That you wish In the whirled Too see O Mother Earth Undertaking Men o’ pause In-fertility rite As nature fecund wanes A roil buzzkill Soon with death teeming Wear is thy sting Extincting that human race Soully certifiable reproductions Unfit as a specious Forerunners to know end Yet today, this solitary caged bird sings Like a canary In a cold mine With its deadly presents Colorless and odious executioner The lynch pin of anonymous hoods Haunting all That which is called “natural” Sow fumes miasma Till hour last breath
This poem is another mournful environmental poem, with the steady decline of bees as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for the deathly threat to the ecology of the earth. Of course, the stoic denial and fatalism of human-induced climate change through fossil fuel consumption reaps a Mother Earth whose only defense may be to open a Pandora’s box capable of “naturally” selecting the human race from an internal combustion race to a mere foot race, where humans are no longer large enough scale to crash the entire planet’s ecological system. If we don’t change course and evolve into an ecologically-sustainable species, we will be devolved into a much less dominant species. Whether this would represent an evolution or devolution would have to be reflected upon by many fewer homo sapiens.
While we as a species are still living high on the fumes of burning fossil fuels, the buzzkill of bee genocide may lead the way to the end of agriculture as we know it, and the end of human culture as we know it. Our unchecked industrialism, fueled by the burning of carbon-based energy forms, may very well lead to our checking out as the predominant species on earth. Could this bee the end of the world? as so aptly asked in an article of the same title (with a now extinct link!):
Albert Einstein once said: “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man.”
Einstein wasn’t an insect expert but he had a point. The humble honeybee is an integral part of the global ecosystem. Honey is just one aspect of what this entomological wonder does. As a pollinator it ensures crops reproduce, so although a world without honey would be a poorer place, man would survive. But without plants, we’d become extinct.
…On a global scale, it is estimated a third of the food we eat is pollinated by bees…
…The introduction to the 2010 UNEP [United Nations Environment Programme] report into global bee colony disorders puts the insects’ plight in context. It states, “Current evidence demonstrates that a sixth major extinction of biological diversity event is under way. The Earth is losing between 1 and 10 per cent of biodiversity per decade, mostly due to habitat loss, pest invasion, pollution, over-harvesting and disease.” It asked, “Has a ‘pollinator crisis’ really been occurring during recent decades, or are these concerns just another sign of global biodiversity decline?”
Unchecked domination is not the nature of nature. Either homo sapiens will learn to live in harmony with nature as a whole, or our ability to dominate will be cut down to scale. As throughout countless generations, we are faced with choosing harmony or destruction. Nature has patiently endured our penchant for destruction. Nature cannot be violated forever. Nature’s feedback is gentle and generous. Only fools destroy the hand that feeds them. Will we be fools in the largesse weigh?
From oasis to oasis Straw men Hiring suckers Living under Dissembled bridges Until it’s over Troubled waters What’s the hold-up Living for weak ends And long vocations Until Down Under One foot in front of the other One foot in front of the other One foot in front of the other One foot in front of the other One foot in front of the other One foot in front of the other A hexing feat A plod Bought and paid for Buy decisions made years a go Putting off family For eternal wrest Friends only gathering in your wake A bout time Spent Pourly Until Can’t take it With them Passing on An assuming manor And a partiality For a stylized life And conspicuous consumption Wear cleanliness is next to gaudiness Awe made passable By a peacocky overcompensation Surpassing one’s station In life A haven untaxed In death A surety As won might Have guest it A regretful time share As when the first homme isn’t enough Always returning Too more earnest dwellings Harping on The good old daze Not even For a second Helping But for the hole shebang In unremitting a morality A temporary re-treat From the fire down below Feeling the heat Strokes of genius Clever ruses billed On foundations of sand Offering slim hope For the porous As liquid assets evaporating In a desert temp An oasis scarcely better Then a mirage For those sitting on the parch A weigh station To check their baggage Perhaps pick up some more Souvenirs For the trip Over their own feat Plunging an unquenchable thirst Skewering with spit Sweating bullets In humid climbs Yet like fish out of water No matter how hard They dry Flailing to inspire In any such reckoning And knot on your life Will they settle For sum thing less And weather they come Ergo For the wrest of US Their goes The neighborhood
This poem is an ode to so-called living from oasis to oasis rather than living sustainably in one oasis. I find that the so-called “carrot” of getting to the next oasis is actually more of a “stick” to nature and our humanity. Americans have suffered from a frontier mentality for centuries, ratcheting up suffering in increasingly exponential ways. Instead of doing the work of learning about and living within natural limits, humans race toward extinction, with a lengthy prologue and rate of over a hundred species a day. Living in harmony, sustainably within our natural environment, may very well be the most important lesson humans need to learn within the next few generations. There is little reason why we shouldn’t be able to learn this lesson, but whether we will avail ourselves of the benefits of learning this lesson is unclear. There is a classic, somewhat cynical exposition from the character Agent Smith in the movie, The Matrix, which gives one perspective on the human race and human nature:
“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.”
I find this description accurate. However, this history leaves unanswered how we will respond in the future. The relevant conundrum that I see in human nature is that the unprecedented capability humans have in making choices undetermined by nature is a serious double-edged sword. This very capability to stretch nature, even human nature, can lead to large, unsustainable ventures which bound over natural limits in which other living entities would be much more “naturally” restrained or contained. Perhaps paradoxically, this very same capability leaves open the potential to adapt quickly and recover a sustainable balance. I find hope in our ability to adapt. Still, humans have a long history of only doing the right thing after exhausting most every other possibility. The stakes are high, and realizing the high stakes may be the necessary impetus for humans to make necessary adjustments. Hopefully, we can restore a level of sanity and balance in time to avoid a catastrophic collapse of civilization and/or the environment. Either way, living in harmony with nature is a better choice. We can vote with our lives and lifestyles. May we embrace our evolution, even revolution, to avoid devolution or extinction.
Unemployment hit a 5-year low Still, Bob remains 100% unemployed
This short poem highlights the difference between statistics and people. Statistics can estimate probabilities with some accuracy of how a large group of people may act, or be affected by something. Statistics cannot reliably predict stuff on an individual level. The farther we get away from individuals, the greater “power” statistics wields. Of course, we could compile all the statistics in the world and estimate what the average or typical human would be like, yet never actually know anything meaningful about any individual human. That typical human being would be a 27-year-old, Mandarin-speaking, Christian, female agricultural worker. Those researchers might well learn more about humanity by going to lunch with their other researchers. To take a simpler example, suppose researchers measured the foot size of every person in the United States and calculated the average value. If leaders used this information to provide everyone with a pair of average-sized shoes, there would be a lot of shoes thrown at such foolish leaders. Except for the exceptional genius of baggy pants, one-size-fits-all often doesn’t work well. In many cases, the truth is closer to one-size-fits-none. The point is that the farther we get away from knowing individual human beings the less we know about humanity.
Statistics is impersonal. Statistics knows nothing of intimacy. Statistics treats human beings as deterministic objects. Only by studying huge numbers of people can statistics succeed at sufficiently washing out individual differences. Granted, most human systems are very complex and many of these differences are, in fact, “material” or deterministic differences. Nonetheless, the grandest fallacy or illusion brought by the power of statistics is that human free will is insignificant and can be ignored or rounded down to zero. The greatest fact that can only be ignored only at the peril of losing our humanity is that human freedom is the very reality that most defines humans.
Bob is not a statistic. Bob is not simply something to be tallied up, or experimented on for other people’s edification. For those who actually care about Bob, statistics provide little human warmth and limited meaning. Without human caring, which is ultimately rooted in intimate human relationships, statistics serve to dehumanize us. The issue is not whether to abandon statistics as a human tool to help understand the physical world around us. The issue is whether our humanity will wield tools for our betterment, or such tools will wither our humanity.
People who seek great power need to scale up their individual power through tools. If the scale of power sought exceeds one’s ability to exercise their humanity, by growing their own humanity and the humanity of others, then tools become weapons against humanity. The exercise, and even threat, of such power exceeding a human scale can tempt others to react in an equally inhumane way. This “self” defense is often justified as an equal and opposite reaction. However, unless inhumane treatment is met with humane treatment, then the interaction is nothing more than physics — every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. If humanity doesn’t respond to inhumanity out its own higher nature, humanity, then it is reduced to inhumanity. Part of human existence is physics. However, if we don’t recognize and live into our higher nature, in the realm of metaphysics, then humans will closely resemble billiard balls, albeit very complex billiard balls. The ability to react in a humane way to any situation is, in fact, what human response-ability is! Newton’s third law of motion, that every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction, is not adequate to explain human behavior. Though, ironically, the less free we become, the closer this seems true. I don’t know about you, but for me, as a free range human being, that’s not the way I roll!
Sadly, the temptations of great power, whether to secure great power for oneself or to react in “self” defense against such dehumanizing power, seem to be an everyday reality for most humans. Modern-day success often seems to rest on either wielding dehumanizing power over others, or, at best, reaching a form of detente, where we react in equal and opposite ways, hoping not to reduce humanity any further, but not willing to risk our humanity to up the game. Unfortunately, any slightest miscalculation will degrade humanity. And the calculating humans required for even the best detente have already sacrificed their humanity to play a game of billiards. In fact, without higher aspirations, people become tools — or at least begin to appear as tools. Yet, people are not tools. Hope springs eternal.
Reintroducing human scales, necessarily smaller and decentralized, resting on a rich and robust foundation of human intimacy, is the greatest challenge humans face in responding to globalization and cancerous capitalistic and consumer culture. We need to get over the notion that modern civilization’s institutions are too big to fail. We need to get over the notion that wee, the people, are too small to make a difference. The truth is the opposite. Western civilization is deeply dependent on dehumanization and continues to race unabated past natural limits, most notably by destroying the very environment we depend upon. Humans depending on dehumanization and doggedly insisting that we “shit where we eat,” is unsustainable. Either humans transcend such dehumanizing dependencies or we will descend into fascism. Either humans learn to live in harmony with nature or nature will “select” us, or at least our cancerous globalized civilization, out of existence in some Darwinian extinction. Nature may be kind enough to simply scale us down a bit, doing for us what we can’t do for ourselves, in a Newtonian third law of motion tour de force. We can do better. Not through hubris and ever more precise power grabs. I suspect the seed of a successful human future will be rooted in personally nurturing Bob and singing songs of humanity rather than bowing to the steady hum of a wickedly efficient bureau of labor statistics.
Dogs pee to mark their territory Humans build walls This is called civilization
There are up sides and down sides to civilization. Western civilization shares at least one thing in common with canines: they both demarcate their territory by the waste they leave at the interface between their territory and the wild. A dog’s territory is just seems less removed from the rest of nature. Nature has a way to deal with waste, with its intricate recycling processes. Nonetheless, humans, in their quest for advancing civilization, put increasing pressure on natural resources and natural processes which maintain balance and health within ecosystems. Not surprisingly, it appears that humans cannot build a wall secure enough to separate itself from the very environment that it depends. The human race does not yet seem to see the finish line as harmonizing with nature, but rather as exploiting and controlling nature. This reality is a backdrop for this short poem. The main gist of this poem addresses the larger issue of human nature. Humans have their own culture, which seems to be a quantum leap different than other life forms found in nature — separate if you will. Is this epic clash between human culture and many harmonies of nature at the essence of human nature? Our propensity to building walls physically, emotionally, and metaphorically, seems as evidence that this might be the case. Or, are these clashes and divisions simply stepping-stones in the evolution to some higher balance? The advancing complexity of civilization strikes me as a confounding mechanism that is a barrier to achieving such a higher balance. There is something profoundly simple in appreciating the harmony of nature. We should not discount its value by its omnipresence; on the contrary, we should heed omnipresence! Western civilization’s apparent addiction to increasing complexity and control, in my judgment, is a dangerous substitute for the wisdom of harmony ever-present in nature. Western civilization’s current heading is dangerously imbalanced. Reestablishing this fundamental balance resides in the already present wisdom of nature rather than some further development of technology to control an unruly nature that can only bend so far to our whims. Ultimately, we must make peace with nature, or humanity will suffer great harm, perhaps even extinction. Perhaps this is exactly the awareness humankind must gain before it can evolve to a higher level. May we grasp the wisdom of harmony ever-present in nature and resist the temptation to worship our own ingenuousness to temporarily forestall impending doom.
A house divided soon Falls From fair-weathered friends A summer fallowing Hommés united spring eternal From perennial buds After a parent winter So goes The eternal seasoning A savor for all The whirled
This short poem is about hope, friendship, and collective action. I must give props to M.K. Gandhi who said something with a similar sentiment: “When I despair, I remember that all through history the ways of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants, and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall. Think of it — always.”
Hope is a common theme in my writings. Partly because the world so commonly seems in so desperate need of hope. Partly because I find the nature of hope intriguing, elusive and indefatigable! After all, I literally graduated from Hope College! Of course, it was with a B.S., so you may want to take what I say with a grain of salt. Though, personally, I’d prefer that you’d take it with innumerable grains of salt, as in Gandhi’s Salt Campaign for independence from British rule:
Led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Congress’s Working Committee decided to target the 1882 British Salt Act that gave the British a monopoly on the collection and manufacture of salt and allowed them to levy a salt tax. Although he faced initial ambivalence and opposition to the idea of targeting the Salt Laws, Gandhi asserted that salt would help unite Indians of all religious communities, castes, and regions for salt represented a basic and crucial dietary need that the British colonial government monopolized for its own benefit. By encouraging all Indians to defy the Salt Laws by manufacturing and selling salt themselves, Gandhi argued, Indians could collectively challenge the authority of the Raj.
At the time of the Indian Salt campaign (1930-31), the United States was in the Great Depression, as a result of reckless financial speculation, another great trickle down from the money changers of the world. Some things never change. The more recent Occupy Wall Street movement recognized that the 99% vastly outnumber the 1% and that direct democracy, empowering the masses to take control of their lives without relying on the profiteering inter-mediators of the 1%. Many mourn the rising and falling tides of social movements, but the currents favoring truth hold sway forever. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.”
The “house divided” reference is both to Mark 3:25: “If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand,” and the famous speech by Abraham Lincoln during his presidential re-election campaign amidst the Civil War (NOTE: “civil war” is perhaps one of the greatest oxymorons ever). The most famous passage of the speech is:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.
As described in Wikipedia, the people’s encyclopedia, Lincoln used this speech to frame the epic moral and political question of the day:
“Lincoln’s goals with this speech were, firstly, to differentiate himself from Douglas, the incumbent; and secondly, to publicly voice a prophecy for the future. Douglas had long advocated popular sovereignty, under which the settlers in each new territory decided their own status as a slave or free state; he had repeatedly asserted that the proper application of popular sovereignty would end slavery-induced conflict, and would allow northern and southern states to resume their peaceful coexistence. Lincoln, however, responded that the Dred Scott decision had closed the door on Douglas’s preferred option and left the Union with only two remaining outcomes: the United States would inevitably become either all slave, or all free. Now that the North and the South had come to hold distinct opinions in the question of slavery, and now that this issue had come to permeate every other political question, the time would soon come when the Union would no longer be able to function.”
This poem attempts to capture some of the flavor — the eternal seasoning — of this perennial cycling and recycling of the work for justice throughout our lives and across generations. Savor the high tides, but be not discouraged when the tectonic shifts of social change seem imperceptible. Winter always passes, and hope springs eternal. And if you still have a headache from all of this, just mix two metaphors, ingest gently, and call me in the mourning.
Today, the Mitt Romney campaign held a “victory” rally at the Seagate center in downtown Toledo, Ohio. Top Pun ran into a mitt-full of cards as the Romney campaign drew a full house; but, as the rain fell, Top Pun declared victory is he drew a royal flush from the Romney campaign, being banned from the event even though possessing a ticket and a media pass. As the rain fell, Romney supporters lined up two by two around their concrete ark, hoping to save themselves from extinction. As the Romney-ites waded patiently to see their would-be monarch, I could tell by the many white faces that this wasn’t the servants entrance! Of course, there were many tanned Romney-ites, but most seem to have vacationed South, or had a tad freaky spray-on or tanning booth tan — perhaps emulating their feckless leader. Even given the many wet backs that were present, few would be mistaken for Latino. The only African-Americans I saw near the Romney lineup were button and T-shirt vendors.
Of course, across the street, there was an anti-Romney protest that was much more colorful! One protester even wrapped themselves in the flag, a gay pride flag, that is. Not wishing to be restrained by the designated “free speech zone,” I protested outside the box. I took the opportunity to walk back and forth on the sidewalk alongside the Romney lineup (with few unusual suspects), of course, with my signs:
The Romney crowd, perhaps not so surprisingly, responded with vitriol. At one point I chanted, “Can someone give me a nice hello, and end of this ugly vitriol.” One woman asked me if I even knew what a blind trust was. I trust that she did. Many in the Romney lineup told me to go to the other side of the street; I suppose in some attempt to keep like with like, and perhaps, hate with hate?! As I walked up and down the so-called Romney side of the street, even a sheriff’s deputy told me to get on the other side of the street. When I told him that I knew my rights, and that walking down the public sidewalk and not blocking the public sidewalk was simply exercising my free speech, the sheriff deputy responded: “Would you be walking along here if this were an Obama event?” I told him that if this Romney event were not happening, that I would have been in Bowling Green protesting the Obama campaign event (likely with a drone and anti-war message). He told me again that I could not be on the side of the street. When I persisted in claiming my first amendment free speech right to be there, he said that I was becoming disorderly. I turned and walked the other way, continuing to walk back and forth, but keeping an eye out for him and his comrades. The saddest part of this encounter is that the sheriff deputy was apparently proscribing a particular type of free speech — like free speech depends on whether you support Romney, Obama, another, or nobody at all!
The most popular response from the Romney crowd was: “Get a job,” often with some ‘hippie’ or ‘cut-your-hair’ comment thrown in for good measure. Occasionally, I responded with “I have a job; in fact, I am self-employed, I created my own job.” Sometimes I might throw in “I even left a government job,” but nary a poker face yielded any approval. Once, when a Romney-ite was particularly uncivil to me, and I requested that we at least be civil, a woman in the crowd showed approval. I did experience two Romney-ites threatening violence. The first was when I overheard a man say to the crowd, “Do you want me to beat up the hippie?” I asked him if he was threatening violence to me and he said, “It’s an offer.” The other person, a man, or perhaps man-wannabe, said “I’ll beat your face in.” I asked him if he was threatening violence to me and he said, “Yes.” I asked him if he’d like me to call law enforcement over and he said, “Yes.” Well, his bully talk didn’t faze my walk. Just goes to show, you can usually rely on the general cowardice of humankind (human-unkind?).
On this rainy day, God rained on the just and the unjust. Most of the Romney-ites hugged the publicly financed Seagate center rationally seeking shelter so as to not tax their dry wits. And, since the first shall be last and the last shall be first, I joined the Romney-ites, the end of a long line. I had secured online the night before my ticket to the event Being practically soaked to the bone, having paid my dews in the open streets, the ink was running on the ticket that I had printed out and the scanner failed to read it. I was told to wait for a higher power. What more irony could I ask for then cryptic ink running on a ruinous ticket. Of course, not relying on serendipitous irony, I had brought a brown manila envelope containing my tax returns for the last 10 years (actually, which are heavily redacted blank sheets of paper). Knowing that airport-like security was to be the order of the day, security personnel would likely ask me to open this envelope. Then, I would respond that I was hoping that if I gave Mitt my tax returns then maybe he would give me his. I knew that this would probably not be satisfactory, and my alleged tax returns would be declared a security threat and the irony would be complete! In the meantime, while I was waiting for a boss-man’s stamp of approval for entrance, the young man with a scanner, the first line of security, saw that I had registered by name as “Top Pun,” and he asked me for some ID. I showed him my media pass (shown below) and my driver’s license. I told him that I was the soul proprietor of the business, that I wrote a blog, and that I was going to report on this event. He asked me what kind of business it was. I told him that I make things like buttons and T-shirts, pointing to my mission statement emblazoned on the media pass and business card, “Maximizing Prophets.” He didn’t seem to have anything to say to this. Just then, a man came out and said that the doors would be closed and locked, so if you wanted to get in, get in now. The young man with a scanner tried to scan my ticket again and it worked! I went through the two sets of doors and got in a short line for their main security check. However, as I waited in the security line, another man told the dozen or so of us waiting at security that the fire marshal said they were full and we had to leave. We went outside. After a little while, someone came back out and said that we could go in again. Again, I got in the security line. Just as I had emptied my pockets and the woman at security asked about the brown manila envelope, a sheriff deputy called me back through the set of doors. The sheriff deputy instructed me that the event organizers would not let me in their event. There it was: I was officially uninvited from the Romney victory rally. Be the change you want to see in the world. Now, if we could only all get uninvited from a Romney victory rally…
Top Pun's mission is to maximize prophets. Top Pun creates serious, funny, and seriously funny peace and justice designs which are available on your choice of
products such as buttons, T-shirts, and bumper stickers. Top Pun blogs to highlight additional facets of his word artistry such as pun-filled poetry and funny political satire, free posters, as well as political actions of local and global importance -- and don't forget the noncommercial, public health radio show available online, Just for the Health of It . Top Pun's serious playfulness ever reminds us that justice is no yoke, and the pun is mightier than the sword!
Mother Nature is awesome and powerful. In this envisioned scenario, humans don’t make it, at least not in any form resembling our current civilization. In the first line of the poem, I reference the word “man” as expiring, that is, lowercase man, not humankind. I snuck this in as an opening to survive, if in fact, in the yin and yang of life, the patriarchal male force is brought into balance with the nurturing/healing female force. I don’t think that it is any accident that nature, Mother Nature, is typically viewed as female across many human cultures. If we don’t respect females, then we are doomed to an existence far short of our awesome potential, or, perhaps, simply doomed to extinction. May we as a species, one among many, find a balance befitting the awesome benevolence of Mother Nature.
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