Beyond Deprivation

Principled or vile, honorable or depraved, we all view the same stars, suffer the same dread. The richest minds among us were all once bedwetters. The puerile erect walls like Trump’s fortification, they imagine iron and concrete impervious to the ghosts of culture and language, never recognizing the absurd futility, never once realizing their enslavement to their own defenses. Here we are conjoined, the tormented with their tormentors, the marginalized with the entitled awash in the night long freezing rain culminating in a new morning light where we yearn to find new hope. No one has reformed. No one is converted and yet, no one is the same. The pages of days flip past. We find great promise discarding our malignancy of mind, the dark ages we left behind. We see a future as we climb free from our climate of abhorrence, the mind games of conspiracy, though we still contend with our bigotry, our racism, our dogmatism, paradoxically, we also find our capacity to love unconditionally.