Mankind may not be getting better because, according to Richard Dawkins in River Out of Eden:

The primacy of family ties in all human societies and the consequent appeal of nepotism and inheritance.

The limited scope of communal sharing in human groups, the core common ethos of reciprocity, and the resulting phenomena of social loafing and the collapse of contributions to the public  good when reciprocity cannot be implemented.

The universality of dominance and violence cross human societies (including supposedly peaceable hunter-gatherers) and the existence of genetic and neurological mechanisms that underlie it.

The universality of ethnocentrism and other forms of group-against-group hostility across societies, and the ease with which such hostility can be aroused in people within our own society.

The partial heritability of intelligence, conscientiousness, and anti-social tendencies, implying that  some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems, and that we therefore face an inherent trade-off between equality and freedom,

The prevalence of defense mechanisms, self-serving biases, and cognitive dissonance reduction, by which people  deceive themselves about their autonomy, wisdom and integrity.

The biases of  the human moral sense, including a preference for kin and friends, a susceptibility to a taboo mentality, and a tendency to confuse morality with conformity, rank, cleanliness, and beauty,

Hiding behind seat on a bus on the way to college’s last day of classes. Bad people see me and make me  clean up at front of bus and middle. I’m in a hurry to get to class so work especially hard. I’m on a bus with no schedule. No one checks up on how the schedule is running. It is not the bus I should be on.  Finally the driver says here comes the bus you should be on. I run out the door and stand in front of the oncoming bus and wave my arms. My old driver gives money to pay my fare. I get to school and have missed the last class but the food line is still open. I pick out what I want to eat and find I have the money in my hand–$10.  Someone is passing out grades and I find  out I  have he best grades in that old class–three E’s and an award of some kind.  I find my new class and sit near the front.

Earlier in the dream I am at the seashore in a wealthy lady’s house and Rob and his friend are there. The lady likes them, and me. (I think some of this part was from fiction I had been reading).

On the bus I had mentioned that I had been involved in a holdup or something and a woman there said she had covered the story.  At some point I was offered to be paid for 3 hours in a play by somebody on the phone.   (I think the lady had lent me money for that semester because my source had been stolen (based on the Dick Francis book I had been reading?)

Congratulations to you and your guts.

This is an enlightening and heartfelt bi-polar discussion.

Today–September 9–is the day for a scheduled prison riot in 20 states.  Looking up my own state I found that “Ohio holds the distinction of being the first state to sell off a public prison to a private corporation. This happened in 2011 when Governor John Kasich oversaw the sale of Lake Erie Correctional Institution to the Corrections Corporation of America. The sale was promoted as a way to save the state money, but according to the ACLU of Ohio, the plan largely backfired….” (www.acluohio.org/prisons-for-profit)

A false labor so long

it seems like forever.

Surely ’tis a natal

constipation supreme;

reluctance to emerge,

stubbornly huddling

in their author’s belly

’til no longer able

to resist, they pop out

from the mysterious

cave of the long silence,

across the waiting page.

Now tumbling, gleefully

chortling, head over heels,

welcome my dears at long

last: the birth of a poem.

Submitted to d’Verse, first in The Selected Poems of the Athens Library Poetry Group 2014