God loves children –

Kings 2 2:23-25

Old Friends

I wrote a poem while on the last of a stint of coffee:

Discretion, in the eyebrows

Tersely clutching apprehension

In the Folds of a hidden Hand

Pocketing an address book

And

Hovering, like god

To wipe the dust and bones from the earth

With a flick of a wrist

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Maybe it's no T.S. Eliot or Cummings but I wrote with a haiku feel, trying to accentuate lines of paused contemplation.

I Changed The World

Wicked Witch of the West or Politician in True Form?

“At the end of the day, politicians are people too... But what about during the day?”

~ Stephen Colbert

We live in an age of tempestuous politics, in which lettered legislators vehemently debate sedulous ideologies. These are often great horned demons whose vociferous lips are lined with insidious intent. From whose perch flies the ghastly blue monkeys to terrorize the world all the while muttering “I’ll get you my pretty and your little dog too!”.

The world of politics, no matter how monstrous isn’t exactly the epitome of the abyss. Although one cannot shy from the strong resentment led by group of political naysayers, the sobering reality is that aside from their stints of terrorizing little puppies and sending blue winged cronies to take away Medicare from old people, politicians have done some good.

From the protection of our streets to the education of our minds the government has cared, nurtured and suckled us like a piglet to the sow. We praise the cops who are our knights in blue armor. Teachers (although rather underpaid *cough*) are held up as a symbol of an altruistic will. Inscribed over the Library of Thebes were the words :

“Libraries: The medicine chest of the soul.”

What better to bestow these gifts on the stoic masses than Government. Government has helped your life. Although not always to the most selfless of standards, government has helped those yearning masses breath free.

It is for that that government is a necessary evil.

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So then what is that lies just beyond funny façade of men in digital screens bartering for the will of the people. What lies just beyond the rule that gives us what we want, what we know. What lies beyond the will of the people.

In a world too foreign from ours to feign eyes except by the most attentive. Is a world whose reign was not our idyll. Was not even our nightmare. A nadir of a world. A world of Apartheid, Genocide, Torture, and Slavery. A world were women are beaten and mutilated for being just that. We sit at the precipice of fortunes and yet selfishly deny the reality of this world. We live in our veil of TV screens and tabloids while behind our paper shields, shots are fired into the hearts of nations. As we blind ourselves from the fruits of the worlds sculptors, the most selfish action we can take is none. So many a will less mass has fell from fortune into a page in a history textbook because no one would look, or care about what was going on behind their daily veil. So many genocides have been perpetrated and the only ones to scream were the ones with the last breath to breathe.

Reality is cold and harsh and no amount of time has ever separated us from true horror. 65,000 People at the Technical School pictured above were lured there by a Bishop and a Mayor. 45,000 were killed on site in two days April 21 and 22, 1994. The rest, who fled, were found hiding in the nearby church and were killed also.

Most of you who read this were living at the time, you may have been young, but it was within your generation. It is and has always been within the grasp of a generation and that is essence of a change.

With each new generation speaks a voice, your voice*. So speak it! Scream It!

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

*I’m sorry but Kanye West is not the voice of your generation.

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“An age is called Dark, not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it.”

-James Michener

Let your voice echo through people and ricochet off the cold metal world and let them hear your ring is not hollow. Grab a spoon and stir the masses because if you sit idle you will be stirred. The good government is not what I say, or Obama says, or even you say. It is what we all say and if you aren’t speaking than you must accept whatever someone else decides for you. If you don’t speak, you don’t deserve to complain.

Libraries, Cops, Firefighters, Hospitals, and Schools did not form from some altruistic ooze. They were sculpted by people just like you and I from an unwieldy world of marble and stone. People who knew their opinions, knew the fight, and fought it!

You must know yourself. Know where you stand. The issues that face our world are many and various but through people you can do more than body dictates. Find out what concerns you and push people towards it. As a single person you can only do so much but en mass you can change nations.

Choose the Issues that mean the most to you:

· Abortion

· Affirmative Action

· Age Discrimination

· AIDS

· Animal Rights

· Anti-Semitism

· Child Advocacy

· Civil Rights

· Cloning

· Conflict Diamonds

· Corporal Punishment

· Creation vs. Evolution

· Darfur

· Discrimination

· Drug Policy

· Drugs in Sports

· Educational Equity

· Environmental Health

· Euthanasia

· Feminism

· Firearms

· Global Change

· Global Warming

· Green Living

· Health Care Policy

· Housing

· Human Genome

· Human Rights

· Immigration Reform

· Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual

· Men's Movement

· Multiculturalism

· Peace and Nonviolence Pollution

· Population

· Race and Racism

· Tax Reform

Research them viciously.

"A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again."

-Alexander Pope

Only through knowledge do we attain the potential to grasp our dreams. Such that each bit of knowledge reinforces one another in an exponential leap to power. When we have leapt to power our wills sing in harmony one voice that will forever alter all we hold toward a greater day of human joy.

Lest a schism purge us.

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It would be truer a sentence to say a schism will always transgress against our views, weather it purges us lies in the essence of our argument, our will, and how much we believe ourselves.

Mankind will always challenge and fighting for your views may clash with opinions at the forefront. If you twist your opinions to quench the thirst of a naysayer what can you say of your beloved opinions. What right do you have to even have them. You must stand for what you believe and all that you see on the horizon.

Change your views when the light of a truth, a reason, or new knowledge is interjected into the view you hold so you that it may grow and coalesce into a whole idea that is greater than the one you held before. Do not be afraid to challenge another ideal because if one is correct the truth will prevail.

Be the catalyst for change. So often the road to destitution or utopia is balanced on the edge of a knife blade. Never be comfortable with mediocrity for such an idea has held back the progression of the greatest ideas of humanity.

If a mob stands in the way of your dream, know that one kind person is stronger than thousand angry mobs because an angry mob is fueled on irrationality and their anger will die but the one act of kindness will live on as a seed every person who you touched.

You can do more giving a life of work than few seconds of death. You are never dying so long as you never quit. A dream lived in every person before you. Billions were stifled by their own passiveness, you can die and join the rank of those who were never heard, or you can be a voice for all who ever shared in your dream.

Live so that you are heard, live so that you have the right to say

“I Changed The World”