More Blue Collar Blues

Be careful with the social seeds you plant.
For liberal pontificating rants
may make the world safe for democracy,
but for the rest it breeds autocracy.
Then hearsay functions for the rule of law,
where growing pains become a fatal flaw,
and visceral respect for basic rights
is compromised by making free speech slights
against society. A flip remark
that resonates like Pekinese dogs bark –-
without a bite –- are bellowed in the court
of Cable News where one’s defense falls short
of an acquittal by the talk police,
whose smug reverberations never cease.
For they project in other people’s hearts
the remnants of their own internal warts.
It’s somewhat like the Salem trials of yore
where scapegoats brooked what slanderers foreswore.

For no defense can satisfy demands
of smug, self-righteous demagogues who stand
in tandem with the people who they judge,
because the mote that’s in their eyes won’t budge.
Nor do I miss the bitter irony
that one can’t hurl an ethnic slur at me,
but someone threatening to kick my butt
gets points for this dehumanizing juggernaut.
Beware politicos cum autocrats,
since sanitized inside the laundromats
of CNN and some such cable news
outlets, that offer us one-sided views --
affording the foundation that they built
on backs of slaves, a plush veneer of gilt.
Some cynics just complain. But since no one
defends their rights in lieu of pols who run
their mouths opposing truth and liberty,
I’d be defenseless should they come for me.