Category Archives: Power

Please read Anglo Swiss’s post before mine.  You may find it in the Reader or HERE.

A Leader Reader

Politics distress me. They send me to my bed.
I prefer the nightmares that I conjure in my head.
For to get over nightmares, it is a piece of cake.
I simply give up sleeping and remain wide awake.

But the world situations that most bother me
do not disappear when I turn off the damn TV.
They just go on mouldering when they’re not in my view
while all our fearless leaders just do and do and do.

I think that the solution might just be to tell them, “Stop!!!”
Every nation on the earth trying to be cop
for all the other nations seems somehow not to work,
for sometimes the one supervising is the biggest jerk!

Though I don’t know the answer, perhaps the Swiss are right.
Perhaps yearly elections would do less to incite
pork-barrel legislation when each man has a vote
the needs of common men might replace needs of men of note.

The only problem we might face, doing so much voting
is that it just might interfere with our TV remoting.
It might be necessary to replace “reality” shows
with just plain reality–where everybody knows

each bill that’s passed and all the facts of governing our nation,
so we would grow up wiser each succeeding generation.
Voting done on cellphones or Android application
might bring out the vote at last, much to the consternation

of politicians dependent on propaganda’s lies,
hoping that the real facts never come before our eyes.
All this campaign financing a phantom of the past
while we’re presented with the truth–finally, at last!!!

(I cite poetic license, folks, as my excuse for this poem. I realize this is a simplistic solution to the world’s problems.  Our government in the U.S. is perhaps too large and too complicated for the Swiss system of governing, so it is  best this world is not governed by such as I!!!)

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: Dear Leader–If your government (local or national) accomplishes one thing this year, what would you like that to be?

When is Enough Enough?

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This picture of the sunset a few nights ago is proof enough that the best things in life are free, but they are easier to enjoy when one is not hungry.

                                                          When Is Enough Enough?
To want all or to want nothing are both dangerous. Those who want all are the conquerors and exploiters and power lords who have brought the world to the state it is in today. They will exploit the poor and the weak but get their feelings of the most power from exploiting those equal to them in power. The world is a game to these people and we are all pawns.

But to want nothing may lead to despair. True, in a few holy men, it has been the path to enlightenment; but for those living within the world and not to the side of it, to want nothing can lead to apathy and powerlessness.

I think the secret lies in wanting enough and then wanting enough for others as well. This doesn’t have to be done by charity. It can be done by the way we vote, the way we treat our neighbors, the way we invest our money and the way we conduct our own businesses. It can be done by the way we bargain for a trinket on the beach or handle wrong change.

Sylvia Plath was probably correct in her statement, “Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” When the richest woman in the world commits suicide or one of the richest men in the world gauges those living hand-to-mouth with unfair cellphone charges and policies, one has to wonder what great lack they are trying to fill and whether in fact they have any true take on what the world is really about.