Monster
What do you do when you realize your country is a monster in the world? How do you convince your fellow citizens that what their country is doing in their name, they are doing? Is there any chance of convincing them that the world sees what their country is when they cannot? Is there any hope when they are doing to themselves what their country is doing to the world?
One of the leaders of the 1857 Indian uprising against the British Empire and the East India Company had traveled to London and found the Dickensian poverty and depravity on the city streets were far from the image of British power he witnessed in his home country.
Thus is the state of the American Empire today.
I walk the streets of my town, one of the most beautiful cities in the world perched on a slender peninsula strutting into a magnificent landscape glowing in a Mediterranean climate, a city that for most of its history suffered the extremes of other cities yet eventually opened its arms to a glorious explosion of diversity, art and tolerance, a city of families and neighborhoods owned by the same, interweaving themselves into a patchwork quilt that comforted all against the intolerance, tribalism and hatred that strangled most of the rest of the world, a quilt of small towns filled with small businesses that manifested in a bracing fog blanketing the city in a surging, purifying bath.
And my town is dying. Weeping piles of desperation - homelessness, drug addiction and Dickensian poverty ooze like pus beneath towering carbuncles of tombstone towers clawing and chewing at the pulsing fog, blocking the light of what's left of the wilting family neighborhoods and proclaiming proudly that the dominant wealth of the few that has crushed the world is crushing San Francisco.
Few of the walking dead that inhabit these towers are over forty. They rise each day in lesser towers and gutted facades to stream through the streets on their way to work in the castle, picking their way over fellow zombies pushing themselves up from the concrete, shaking the night cold from their emaciated bodies, begging to the sky for the fortune of some day living in ice cold cubed domiciles scattered with stick furniture made by slaves, of lives filled with five hundred dollar dinners and fifty dollar cocktails, thousand dollar sweatshirts and sneakers and ripped levies, prancing pressed lipped past their fellow men staggering in front of them, twitching at their feet, issuing piles of shit, rivers of vomit, fountains of piss, offerings to the gods who own the world, who chuckle over their zombies, all of them, the hopeful, the hopeless, the dead.
