On the third Monday in January you’ll find me
writing an ode I can’t quite finish, like a New Year’s
resolution I’ll stick to next time, I promise.
How lovely it would be to live in a nation where
poetry put down insurrections. Then I might bang out
this stanza and go sue a wolf for stealing the moon.
When statues topple, they do little heaving.
You will not see them celebrate long their fall
or mount the wreckage on a wall.
(Who are you to ask that they applaud
your moment of awakening?
The true traitor lacks not morals but moral imagination. I shall
no longer grant the premise that we must debate amidst the
rubble of a world the unimaginative have plundered—
The last thing he saw was the joy in her eyes.
Back home the flowers have wilted and the balloon,
twisting slowly in the now-stale air,
sinks lower and lower to the ground.
To resist through nonviolence, yes—
I’ll do what the data says is wise.
But to love is another matter:
I may wave the flag, but I am no patriot;
Is it not better to burn what they betray?
It does not matter who lit the flame
That burned the Reichstag down,
Only that it burned and so few
Considered what cremation means
To those who long for proper burial.
I spend a lot thinking about whether or not for profit entities can be relied upon to be forces for social good, if they can be at all (see my post on impact investing, for instance). Thus Nike’s recent decision […]
We’ve all heard the Chinese proverb, “Give a poor [wo]man a fish and you feed her for a day. You teach her to fish and you give her an occupation that will feed her for a lifetime.” It’s a great concept, one that is popular with those who are more free market-oriented–they like the notion of hand-me-ups instead of hand-outs–as well as with those who tend toward socialism, as they like the idea of empowering the poor.
This is an oversimplification, but one way to think about the Civil Rights Movement, especially from the mid-to-late 1960s, is that there were two philosophical approaches: Dr. King’s faith-based, inclusive, nonviolent strategy; and Malcom X’s Black Power, “the bullet or the ballot,” movement.