I USED TO CARE guest poem

Published August 15, 2022 by Nan Mykel

I used to care
When I was young
Innocent, perhaps naïve.
There was a future
To be secured and enriched
For my family
For the world.
I voted, confident it counted,
Marched, protested, and was seen,
Wrote letters, and believed they were read,
Debated, and was heard.
I witnessed change
With civil rights
Clean water and air
The end of an ugly war
Even a ban on assault rifles.

Now?
More extinctions
Extensive clearing of rainforests

More guns
More fossil fuels being burned
More voter suppression
Government dysfunction
Expansive partisan division and violence
More corporate greed
Widening gap between rich and poor
More rights stripped away.
I used to care
When I was young,
Innocent, perhaps naïve.
Now…only tears.

Thank you Thomas Shostak for permossion to share this poem

YOU SEE, I CAN NO LONGER KEEP UP…

Published July 25, 2022 by Nan Mykel

…with the young’un bloggers. I can’t even keep up with mature Diane Ravitch, who’s only a tad younger, it seems.

I’ve stumbled recently on an exchange of ideas when viewing Diane and Jill Dennison and Keith Wilson that really gets to the nuts and bolts of things, and from many bloggers on the subject. Maybe Ned Hanson offers such an offering, too. Or maybe Word Press thought I just needed a change? Whatever, I’m convinced that all I can offer at this point is an emotional touchstone. Feelings I have, although rushed by a November election and the question of my own longevity (smile). (I smile when I know I’m being a little grimmer than called for).

Maybe over a year ago I asked readers to think of jingles–maybe to old tunes–portraying issues of the political heart (though I was less flowery). Today, after reading again The Moral Ground by Elie Mystal in The Nation, I put a couple of things together: I would try, myself, to do it tho it receive rejection and avoidance, even ridicule. Here I go willingly into that space, having already failed at an I Am a Woman attempt, which you will never see.:

HOW DARE YOU…

….Tell me what to do.

I wear masks for others.

Do you?

I don’t invade your heart of hearts

nor presume to know your pain.

Look into my eyes and see

another human same as thee.

Those who swallow others’ lies

and betray the Golden Rule

do not attend to their still voice

when push comes around to shove.

Painful decisions require clear-eyed guts

not your state’s grotesque intrusions.

Does your God favor laws that plot

to make me suffer their invasion?

Out out, damned spot I say–

Let the freedom of our people

rule the day.

ROBBING PETER TO PAY PAUL AND PAUL AND PAUL AND….*

Published July 23, 2022 by Nan Mykel

Funny how nothing is so blind as our own mirror. I have been railing against the concept that we force more babies to be born at the same time we are cutting services to them. (Of course, most of them will be persons of color, so more servants?) And at a time of increased automation? Oh well, apparently we won’t be around for the climate denouement.

I just realized that cutting funds for training staff in group homes for the intellectually disabled includes cutting training, staff (and wages) for staff in the gradual closing of long term care for the severely disabled. One of my kneejerk responses is, “Oh well, not likely they’ll live to find a cure for cancer.” Sigh.

Then I realized (the mirror part) that under my own nose the quality of care available to my significantly disabled youngest daughter has degenerated. No one’s to blame except those robbing Peter to pay this Paul and that one and that one, too….That Christian nationalist and that conservative, and that….too.

“To rob Peter to pay Paul“,[1] or other versions that have developed over the centuries such as “to borrow from Peter to pay Paul“, and “to unclothe Peter to clothe Paul“,[2][3] are phrases meaning to take from one person or thing to give to another, especially when it results in the elimination of one debt by incurring another.[4]

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_rob_Peter_to_pay_Paul>