Email Poem

Your IP Address: 216.73.216.44
Your Email Address:
To Email Address:
Subject
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem
Feminist ecotherapists,
deeply immersed in polycultural ecology,
a systematic teleology of cooperative nutrition economics,
remain rarely flushed out from their safe spots.

A self-isolating,
often eremitic,
subspecies,
with shamanic nature-as-spirit tendencies,
our most articulate mentors often wander off
to pray for,
breathe and suffer and dance and sing
with Earth and all Her multiculturing species and seasons,
spaces and times,
avoiding glaring spotlights of media networks
and shallow soundbites.

That said,
perhaps I can share lessons from my eldest
urban BlackMale son
about internal and external landscapes of justice
and passion,
passion for restoring justice
and against unnecessarily traumatic
retributive injustice.

What does justice look like for my 22 year old African American eldest son?
who graduated from special support services 
at Entitled-Elite High School
with a fourth grade cognitive and affective functionality,
no marketable skills other than his physical strength
which shows decreasing likelihood of endurance
due in part to horrid nutrition
lack of self-care
his preference to self-medicate
away from his internal dissonance.

He prefers THC,
although he is angrily aware this means state and federal employment protection laws
form a moat around his buzz,
with all opportunities on the outside
and far too many long-term risks on the inside 
of his bleary silo of despair.

This loyal 
handsome 
young adult son
recognizes discrimination,
marginalization,
poverty
in comparison to outcomes for white privileged self-medicating 
with alcohol.

It's a cultural thing that old people do to his MultiCultural TransMillennial Generation,
like declaring wars so youth can learn to kill each other,
while elders suck our fat wealth deposits into
sporty cars of shifty ludicrosity.

His skills do not include multiplication,
much less division,
but he knows when justice divides his population of young adults
looking for their first jobs,
so they don't have to live under tyrannical oppressors,
condemning, rather than helpful, parents.

Self-medicating with alcohol 
can easily pass through a drug screen test
with one day notice from Human Resources,
while my son watches from the other side
of this divide.

Can he get through at least eight weeks without medication
that does seem to help him feel and think better
of and with himself,
and,
given any doubt that any of this makes any sense,
how long before he stops bothering to apply for any hope of a full life?
Surely long before age thirty?

Eldest son understands the justice and injustice of attending a horribly designed state contracted job program,
to sit for eight unpaid training hours,
for at least four weeks,
probably six or even more,
in a summer classroom with no windows,
with 29 other ADD and ADHD medicated trainees,
to face the dismissive derision of their trainer
for being who they are,

Losers 
who will never actually be sent through to paid employment 
in this card-shark process,
violating perhaps every justice principle intended by the Americans with Disabilities Act,
while the trainer draws his pay at our tax dollar expense.

My son was not outraged that the State had no record of contractual oversight,
no evidence that anyone who did eventually get paid could not have done so with one week's unpaid training,
no evidence that there were no other training contractors with the capacity to avoid violating civil rights 
of those supposedly receiving a service for positive,
nurturing regenerative outcomes,
rather than rejection and dispossession and dismissal and further hopelessness without incomes,
without icons of economic or political integrity.

He was not alarmed that the Commissioner,
his own State Senator,
his US Senator,
the ACLU,
did not seem to raise so much as one eyebrow
to a misuse of public dollars and trust
with outcomes that could not even perform at the thinnest level of Hippocratic justice:
If you cannot do any good,
at least be sure you cause no harm.

He has become used 
within an economic and cultural ecology
that does not include him,
and others who look and act and perform and breathe and beat their hearts,
and try to balance their bicameral hemispheres as best they can
in a "Business-As-Usual-Means-You-Do-Not Matter" environment.

So, he reminds me of what I recognized long ago,
growing up gay male in a homophobic
hetero-dominant
culture.
I am reminded of what it means 
to have no economic right to employment
and no socially supported right to love,
to be disvalued human nature
because intrinsically mendacious,
to be negatively deviant,
sin-infested 
removed from all that feels universally orthodox good,
knowing justice could not include any honest relationship 
within my Beloved Community,
could not include acceptance as a healthy soul
or body
or identity,
as the appropriate offspring of socially acceptable evolution.

My son's bottom line,
"If they wanted to abuse us,
then I wouldn't have minded so much
if they were at least going to pay me.
I'll be The Man's whore if I have to,
but I won't be his ."
CAPTCHA Preview
Type the characters you see in the picture
Required