Somewhere Along the Way

(4 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

He’s fifty, he lost his job three years ago, he won’t ever have a job again because American companies don’t hire the long-term unemployed parasites.  He wakes up Sunday mornings now, with no way to hold his head that doesn’t hurt.  And the beer he has for breakfast isn’t bad, so he has one more for dessert.  Then he fumbles through his closet for his clothes, and finds his cleanest dirty shirt, and stumbles down the stairs to meet the day.

Meet the day, parasite.  Welcome to the Brave New World of the Wall Street Gods, welcome to the Shock Doctrine Century, welcome to hunger games and drones in the sky and batshit ten feet deep in the halls of Congress.  Get ready to dodge bullets when you walk out the door, the NRA has turned America into a free fire zone, remember to salute the Job Creators and the police, bring three forms of photo ID if you’re going to cross the street.  Bring some courage along if you have any left, but leave your dignity behind, you won’t need it out here, hardly anyone in this shit storm that used to be America even remembers what it is anymore.

He’d smoked his mind the night before, on cigarettes and songs he’d been picking.  But he lit his first and watched a small kid, cussing at a can that he was kicking.  Kicking a can down the road, just like the Big Boys of the Beltway, kicking the broken economy can down the road, kicking the global warming can down the road, kicking the Wall Street reform can down the road,  kicking every can in sight down the road, and then kicking them further down the road.

If we make it to November, a hundred million Americans will vote for their favorite can kickers.  I don’t know why they still do that, anthropologists have theorized that it’s some sort of bizarre tribal ritual, like waiting for the sun to come up over Stonehenge.

I saw the old parasite once, he crossed an empty street, and caught the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken, he saw a daddy in a park, with a laughing little girl who he was swinging, he stopped beside a Sunday school, and listened to the song they were singing.  And it took him back to something, something that we’ve lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

We lost some of it on a motorcade through Dallas . . .

We lost more of it in Vietnam . . .

We lost the rest of it in two Reagan landslides, in wars for oil, in Wall Street crime rampages that never end, in tidal waves of corruption that swept everything away except a few progressive websites, where the cold winds of corporate power blow through us like we’re not even there.  

I’ve been around awhile, I’ve wandered the cyber streets with the jobless and the homeless, with the prophets and the poets of the ragged resistance, we write something on a wall here, and something on a wall there, hoping it’ll be read, knowing it will be read, because we’re not the only ones who remember what America has lost, we’re not the only ones who can still hear, somewhere far away, the lonely bell of justice ringing, echoing through the canyons of the past, like a disappearing dream of yesterday.