Science Fiction

August 5 2019

I loved science fiction, as a child,

when it went unsaid

that the world would get better

    ...or at least in the fullness of time.

And then we went to the moon

thought flying cars would be next,

and got computers in our pockets

that let us hear what we wanted said.

But still, the wars went on.

And from the carnage of Pol Pot

to Biafra/Rwanda/Myanmar

the genocides kept happening

as we comfortably looked away.

So that now

young men are saluting like Nazis

and courtesy is collapsing

and southern preachers are ranting

about God and guns and sex;

their plump pink faces

beaded with sweat

as the collection plate is passed.

How they smirk at global warming

so confident in their Lord,

who gave unto us dominion

and wouldn't destroy His creation

or lead us into death.

I write this

after 31 died

at the hands of violent racists,

in the land of the free

where guns are freely obtained.

And where I feel increasingly numb

at another such atrocity,

the tired litany

of thoughts and prayers and blame.

In a time

when Trump defiles the White House

and the left competes to be pure

and the right persists in obstructing

for tribalism and money,

a smugly smiling Mitch McConnell

summing up our cynical age.

Meanwhile, the planet burns

and the seas will soon engulf us,

the lethal result

of inertia, denial, greed.

Of our criminal inaction

as we let our phones distract us

and life go seamlessly on,

incrementally simmering

like the slowly boiling frog.

While those who care

feel crushed by despair,

the powerlessness of one.

Yes, we have become more aware

of what makes the good life

and how our fate is shared;

that happiness

is not about wealth,

and it took much more

than the self-made man

to really make himself.

Nevertheless

the fiction never came true,

and despite our dazzling cleverness

we have failed to better ourselves.

So 50 years from Woodstock

the hippies are mostly dead

and the poor are no less desperate

and the earth is under stress

as it's never been before.

Science helped get us here.

But technology

cannot change human nature,

and if character is destiny

then our fate is painfully clear.

A blurb seems superfluous here. Because the poem speaks for itself.

Perhaps even more, just the fact that is was written. Because I don't really approve of political poems, and think arguments like these are best made in prose: in essays and articles and self-indulgent rants. So to write such a poem betrays my deep frustration, my feelings of utter impotence, my exasperation at seeing everything repeat without any real change.

The immediate impetus for this was day in which 20 were killed in a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, and another 9 at a shooting at a bar in Dayton. Countless more were wounded. I know I have to be specific about these two incidents. Because otherwise, with so many mass killings and gun deaths in the US, a curious reader would have to cross reference by date to recall them. We have become inured to such events: numb, desensitized, forgetful. They all meld together: the same lame appeals to thoughts and prayers; the same inaction wrt to gun laws; the same denial of the dangers of right wing extremism (not to mention how it has been enabled by a despicable President and his own spineless enablers). ...You see, this is more satisfying in prose!