maine journals / 11.30.20 / empathy eradication

This country was founded

on supremacist principles

and today rots

out from underneath its citizens.

Millions are incarcerated and millions are hungry.

Countless walk on a precipice

battered by evictions

homelessness

intense unnecessary suffering.

Those who still cling to the notion of America

as a free, fair, or “better” nation

are the personifications of its inevitable decay.

Broken beliefs take up root in broken psyches.

The ego’s unchecked tear through human history

threatens now

to eradicate empathy,

civilization’s balancing force.