In February 2015, I wrote a post called My complicated relationship with poetry. After re-reading it, I figured it was time for an update…
Continue reading
history
The lesser of two evils (a poem)
Every time I see somebody advocating voting for ‘the lesser of two evils’—especially when it is followed by a statement of helplessness—I get angry. Regardless of which candidate you like in this (or any other) election, the whole point of voting is to elect the best person for the job. If you think Candidate A is the best person, you vote for Candidate A. If you think it’s Candidate B, C, or D, you vote for that person. Or maybe you write in the name of someone you think is qualified, but is not otherwise on the ballot—that’s why that space is there.
Instead, what keeps happening is that people figuratively hold their noses and literally vote for Candidate A because Candidate A is not Candidate B. ‘The lesser of two evils is still less evil’, they say. Guess what? If that is the rationale, then evil has already won, even if Candidate A wins. And this keeps happening because The Establishment, let’s call them, have, through faulty logic and sheer repetition, convinced people that things cannot work any other way, that voting their conscience will result in the ‘more evil’ candidate winning—thereby ending democracy as we know it.
The problem with this is that we are not going to get the government we want if we keep compromising this way. It doesn’t work well in everyday life (I’m living proof of this)—so how can it work when it comes to voting?
My two bits: vote your conscience.
Continue reading
The dream is over (A poem)
Contemplating things that have and have not changed…
Continue reading
Frontispiece (A poem)
A bit of stream-of-consciousness writing while watching an episode of Sleepy Hollow…
Continue reading
An observation (a poem)
I wrote this poem last month after watching Selma, but it is something I have been thinking for quite some time—especially when I stop to consider that many of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s that most of us view as mere history took place within my lifetime…
Continue reading
My complicated relationship with poetry
I may edit this later. For now, I am posting it as is, even though I have written about some these things before. In the words of Robert Fripp, it is ‘better to be present with a bad note than absent from a good note.’ Continue reading