Here's an example. One of the people I like to read on here is @johnzajac . Unfortunately while I like to read a different opinion than my own I often respond in the same way, apologetically, aware that I'm repeating myself: he'll write that the US people will soon rise up, I'll write that I don't think they will.

So today I found myself thinking of a poetry verse I'd written. Why should I keep expressing the same thing over and over when I wrote a whole poem about it?

The poem is called "Signals". It was written a few months before GWB's re-election, so I suppose 2004. Here's a copy of it:

https://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2012/09/signals.html

What's the poem about? People who've heard a quick orally read version tend to think it's about an imaginary country somewhere. Well reader interpretation is all, but no it's about the US.

I'll do a little bit of close reading.

"When we were waiting in the line
It passed hand to hand to hand
“Ten”, the note read
We looked at, up, eye to eye
And waited
For the branded bottles of water
Among the flies
The mold, the crooked sign
Unmoving"

This is all of us, all of us on social media wondering what the muffled signals we perceive mean, also all us in bread lines, passing notes in the mold of empire (as Dirt Wizard writes about).

"On the CRT
The flights sent to Uzbekistan
Dropping people one-way
Only digits came back"

The poem historicizes itself. This is during the GWB days of "extraordinary rendition". In an inversion, the destination is named but not our location.

""Four" he laughed crazy
To the people at the nation's mall
"More years" he laughed
"You all want more"
And they nodded,
More"

Authors often write partial surrogates for themselves into their work.

"The radio said three angrily
In between the uncanny voices
The old-time talk
They had been talking from the beginning
About three-fifths,
Three fifths
And how that was always
Written, always should be"

In our degraded search environment -- in evil Google -- what is the first suggested slop iink if you type in 3/5 and nothing else? It's

What was the 3-5 rule for slaves?

"When all the LEDs
On all the alarm clocks
Blinked two endlessly
The people
Who were to have awoken that day
Looked, groggy,
Decided to get up, go on,
Wanting it over with
Wanting it the same"

And now the thought about waking up, which I had as I woke up today. Oh right I wrote it in this poem.

What do the people wake up to do? They wake up, groggy, dutifully go on, re-elect the same person. They wake up and do the same thing.

"On the final day of that country
The voice said One, everyone heard it
"One" and they took out matches
"One" and burned the books that told them they were good
"One" and stumbled, footsore, into the wilderness"

This poem has a model of how change happens for us! That model is: catastrophe. People wake up and physically can not continue, they burn every lying piece of trash like our Constitution that told us we were good people. It's disaster. And also the only way we can change.

This is ... Book of Amos territory. A very ancient model of social justice and how it works, the first model in our traditions.

None of this long thought of mine is really due to anything that Trump is done. It's not even recent, for a person. It's a thought-crystal from 2004.

Does that mean it's forever? No. When it becomes less relevant I'll stop thinking of it.

But it's not a new conclusion.