I have worn team colours in the past
Becoming cloaked in corporate identity
Giving away autonomy for crowd acceptance
Fitting in
Becoming a proxy for a marketing strategy
Where boardroom fictions based on superficial studies into buying habits
Create reality
Reality that echoes the worst excesses of selfish greed
When textiles were made with the blood of children mixed into cotton gins
And even Factory Acts failed to halt the exploitation of the poor
We thought we were better than our forebears
In our industrial self-righteousness
When union shops paid living wages
And workers could afford the products they made
Until the owners closed the factories
Shipped them overseas
Replicated the conditions of early 19th century Manchester
In countries far away
Countries that have no qualms about spilling blood
In support of commerce
So that marginalized westerners who no longer have factory jobs
Can afford cheap clothes at big box stores
Ignorant of the bloody fingerprints that are sewn into each label
Uncaring that everyday low prices reflect everyday absent ethics
And a high tolerance for suffering
So we buy products we don’t really need
Made in places that we’ll never see by fingers that we’ll never touch
Not caring that those fingers lie buried in rubble
Crushed by profit margins and unleavened greed
Victimized by the impersonal message of capitalism
That values money more than morality
And quarterly earnings more than souls
David Trudel © 2013
Dystopian Rant
I heard that it’s raining at the North Pole
Which seems about right these days
In this world that’s been pulled inside out
It’s getting weird and all fucked up
I don’t usually use words like that, but really
What can you say about the poles melting
About a world gone mad
Where crazy people massacre innocent victims with assault weapons
And redneck conservatives who think they’re religious
Defend their right to do so
It’s all fucked up
A nation founded on liberty and justice for all
Doing a 180
Into tightly controlled security
And arbitrary arrest and detention
While their President, who taught law at Harvard
Authorizes state sponsored assassinations instead of arrests and trials
What happened to the rule of law?
It’s all fucked up
This is a world where even the frozen hearted northern queen
Unthaws and weeps at what we’ve done
While corporations misapply copyright law to steal our genes
And declare fresh water superfluous to the common need
This is a world that spends more time
On vacuous entertainment and spectator sports
Than on education and creation
This is a world that celebrates hate and divisiveness
And calls it democracy
It’s all fucked up
The good guys never were good
Except at publicity and keeping secrets
So now they’re freaking out over the leakers
The truth tellers
And it’s like a highballing truckdriver who’s just been bit by a wasp
Swatting madly in the cab
Hurtling through the night
Towards midnight and an appointment
That I would much rather those assholes didn’t keep
But they’re the ones driving this rig
Elected officials and their corporate masters
Leading us into unmitigated disasters
Bastards
So yes, I declare that it’s all fucked up
In this world of miracles
Where some of us live in paradise
But most just live in hell
And hell is coming to everyone else
In apocalyptic fury
Sweeping away what meager defenses we thought we had
On the wind or the tide
Or the turn of the screw
It’s all fucked up
David Trudel © 2013
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