Is it time for a change yet?

Is it time for a change yet? Plenty of people would say so. Plenty seem to think so.

After decades of deregulation of the banking and finance sectors, all carried out with the specific aim of allowing the rich to get richer, the economy of the masses has suffered severely, while those at the top are enjoying a type of wealth, status and privilege never seen by this planet before. From shelter to sustenance and everything in between, the most basic needs of people have become so commercialized, commoditized, controlled and corrupted, that even little Oliver would need a credit check before humbly asking for “more.”

Is it time yet?

With tent cities and homeless camps cropping up across the nation, houses and whole neighborhoods sit idle, awaiting a speculators figures to give the green light to part them off like a used car that goes to rot in a patch of tall weeds. As major American cities find themselves going up for private auctions to pay debts to nebulous conglomerates of wealthy financiers, with the working people who stand to suffer the greatest, erroneously being saddled with the blame, social strife and crimes born of generations of desperation and need are met with brutality and obstinate loathsome judgement, the systems in play taking great lengths to ignore the true sources of such problems.

Is it time yet?

A multi-tiered political system of separate but equal, offering tip-top influence and power to the highest bidder while striving to convince the people below that their votes count, while taking every available step to prevent them from casting one, sets out false paradigms of left and right to distract the masses from the cancer of corporate oligarchy, while throughout the whispers and cries for revolution, doubt as to the prospective virtue of public and collective good are sewed throughout so as to ensure no consensus is reached between the options of responsive state and anarchistic social Darwinism. The glossy fliers, hi-definition commercial promises and cults of personality which are force fed each election cycle, seek only to harness the nebulous rage of the people for their own quick victories, before all is turned back to serve the moneyed influence peddlers and corporate masters of this, our industrial power complex and still, we’re told that our voice matters.

Is it time yet?

Non-violent nobodies finding their lives taken away as they’re penned up in steel and concrete boxes, with murderers, rapists and thieves of the higher orders of our society given little more than stern warnings as “affluenza” shifts from being a made-up term used to defend the privileged in court, to a common concept more descriptive of the broken class based in-justice system and it’s contrived measure of human value. The best government money can buy, the finest justice that status can claim.

Is it time yet?

Body counts in foreign attacks quantified by nationality. “Five Americans and fifty others, dead.” A subtle attempt to further dehumanize those who are not of our tribe, for the purpose of making their casual murders in the name of freedom and commerce acceptable to the masses. Generations raised on war, with concepts of virtue, honor and duty being co-opted for the purposes of nationalist combat. The endless hours of Halo and director’s cut blu-rays of countless romanticized war movies, indoctrinating the underclasses into the notions that killing and dying for your country is more noble than living to better your world.
The concept of empire, now repackaged as a quest to “defend freedom,” so as to distract from resource grabs and subjugation that has come to define American multinational business. An “us-versus-them” narrative, so well crafted, that the minute and relative differences between cultures are sold as reason enough for “us” to kill “them” and take what they have.

Is it time yet?

The classic slave pens of old have now been replaced with wooden stools for the elderly to sit  upon as they greet Walmart shoppers on their way to purchase sneaker and t-shirts made by children, labeled as “workers,” for whom the net cost of a single shoe is often greater than the daily wage paid to make a hundred of them. The notion of slavery, while simply abhorrent to the people, now written off as costly for companies who’ve realized that to enslave a person in the land they live and pay them fractions of pennies so as to say they’re getting a “fair deal,” is now joined with the word “wage” at home and “outsourcing” abroad. The cost of wealth, again proving to be dignity of millions.

Is it time yet?

Courts which now serve the purposes of rationalizing the inhuman evils of greed, corruption, subjugation, erosion of civic virtue and the domination of the many at the hands of the few, rule from polished benches set high above the heads of those below. Ruling on matters of popular consequence with only exclusive benefit in mind, these men and women, many of whom call themselves ‘Christian,’ slam gavels to call for order before casting judgment upon matters which so often break the very commandments of compassion espoused by their enlightened profits, while turning to some selective interpretation of the law, further rationalizing the evils they do in the name of supposed order. A system corrupted by ideology and self-righteous condemnations, which at the same time while consistently serving wealth and entitlement to power, makes the concept of justice so murky, that even those who suffer are led to question if they did something wrong.

Is it time yet?

Whereas police were once called “civil servants,” the term is now lost beneath armor plating and hidden behind assault masks and soldier’s rifles. So militarized are those who are supposed to be our protectors, that by both equipment and action, one is hard pressed to find the difference between detectives in small town America and commandos in Afghanistan. Flashbangs in toddlers cribs and “justified homicides” occurring in every other raid at a wrong address, discretion as the better part of valor has now been replaced by might making right, with the shield now protecting our oppressors from the rage and will of those oppressed, signifying little more than their place as modern city guards, sent out to protect the new nobility, in this new feudal era.

Is it time yet?

Our politics, our police, our courts and our corrections. Our industries and energy, economy and medicine. Our candidates and managers, our labor and our sweat. With revolution brewing is it time for action yet?