A Glass House

 The cities gleam,
Forests of glass and steel,
Roads paved with the remains of ancient beings, 
and the stones upon which they once lived.

The people gaze upward, 
searching for the sun, 
searching for the dawn of a new day.

The rich have claimed the sky and the sun. 
They stare out of giant windows, gazing at the masses, 
At the heart that pumps blood through their cities.

The money they make, they will plant in the ground.
To keep it safe, they say, from those who would steal it.
"We plant it so that it will grow, nourished in our care.
Someday it will bear fruit, fruit from which we will all feed."

The people are angry.
"That's not true," they say. "We give you our money,
And in your hands it withers and dies, leaving us with 
Ground upon which nothing will ever grow. With our money, you built 
Skyscrapers to blot out the sun, machines to replace us, and the homes in which we are trapped.
Everything you do you do for our benefit, but all you have brought is suffering."

But what can they do, trapped in their world of glass and steel,
Driving over the remains of forests and deserts, trapped in their concrete walls?
What can they do but scream as the earth warms, disease spreads, and their world turns to ash and dust?

They are trapped in a glass house,
And everyone is holding a stone.  

The people cry, 
angry and sad and alone.
Voices unheard,
Echo into darkness.

Trapped in their cities, 
Unable to survive,
Begging the rich for the right to live once more.

The rich, defiant as ever, denying what's to come,
Laugh and say,
"What will you do,
In your world of glass and steel,
When the windows are smashed, the steel frame rusts,
And the pavement becomes unbearably hot?
How do you plan on stopping us from making money,
No matter the price you pay?
We have taken your money, and we couldn't give it back even if we wanted to.
If you want it, you'll have to take it from our corpses,
If you dare."

The people rage,
"We will do what it takes," They scream,
"If it is you who has destroyed our world,
Then it is you who must make it right,
For that's the reason we gave you our money in the first place.
What we gave, we gave in the hopes 
That you could do what we couldn't do on our own.
You said that with enough money,
You could bring the dead back if you wanted to.
But the weather gets worse,
Our wells dry up,
We die from plague after plague,
And still you watch us
From your glass towers,
Mocking as though we aren't able to destroy you."

Will they break free of their glass house?
What is the price they'll pay?

The smart ask what they hope to accomplish,
While the stupid pretend nothing's changed.
The fearless demand they grab boulders,
While the timid say peace is their only hope.
Neither good nor evil
Knows what their goals should be anymore.

Concrete is broken.
Stones fly.
Towers collapse.
All our morals burn,
Replaced with emptiness so deep, no amount of hope could ever fill it.

In the end, we couldn't go back even if we wanted to.

Glass lines the streets,
Steel beams sag,
The air is thick with smoke, ash and dust.
We know how it happened,
Though we do not know why.
Everyone sits in shock,
Quietly blaming everyone else,
And all ask themselves;
What happens now?

The cities crumble,
Pulled down by the weight of their steel frames.
Plants push through pavements,
Broken by wind and rain.

The people gaze upward,
Through smoke and dust,
Searching for the sun,
Searching for the dawn of the new day.

The rich are gone,
Eaten by scavengers,
Paying the price for their greed and thoughtlessness.

Slowly,
Carefully,
People rebuild.
Their anger spent, 
They get on with their lives.

Some say things are worse,
Some say they're better,
Most agree the price was much too high.

As they look around
At the remains of the glass house,
A prison and home at once,
They ask themselves;
Did we do the right thing? 

      I wonder how many Americans agree with the statement, "My world is ending and I'm scared."

      I would say that the world is ending, in a way. People everywhere are realizing that they aren't happy with the status quo, and they want to change things, to make things better for them. 

     I've been waiting for the right opportunity to publish "A Glass House". I keep hoping that people are going to read it. I don't think it'll be remembered as one of history's greatest poems. To be honest, I'm a little sad it's stayed as relevant as it has. 

     Ever since November of last year, I've been working on trying to increase my blogs popularity for one reason and one reason only. In 2020, shortly after the George Floyd protests, I started work on a poem I titled "A Glass House". It took me over a year to finish it, but I've finished it now and I want people to see it. It's a summary of what I think the problems with society are and how I think things are going to shake out, more or less. 

   I've decided I'm going to publish it next Monday. It won't be famous, in all likelihood, but now, more then ever, I think people need to see it. I'll post it on my Facebook and Twitter accounts to. Heck, maybe I'll find other places to post it. I just think people need to see why it is that our world is falling apart. 

     I have one opinion on the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's wrong, morally, ethically wrong, to deny women the right to abort, no matter the reason. It is, I feel, a decision that shouldn't need defending at this point. People keep telling us why abortions are necessary, why they're complicated, how it's not just about abortion. Yet people keep fighting it, because they will defend the lives of children, so long as they never have to see them. So long as they are never reminded of the fact that not everyone is capable of raising children, or the fact that the United States has never made childcare an adequate priority. The decision to overturn Roe v. Wade stems from the same mindset that gets rid of benches at bus stops so that homeless people can't find a place to sleep, a mindset that insists, "If we ignore it, it will eventually go away." 

     The final segment of Fantasia 2000 is set to Stravinsky's The Firebird, and is based on the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Watching that segment again, I was struck by how hard it was hitting me emotionally. It just felt a little too close to home watching the spring sprite's reaction to the forest burning up, and seeing her almost dead afterwards. But that segment isn't about loss, it's about rebirth. That's what I'm hopeful for. I don't want to go "Back to Normal", I want something new. Maybe something that looks a little bit like what we had in the past, but I don't just want a retread of the old world with all of the same problems. 

    I look at our country, and I'm struck by how badly we need something new. People are watching the world fall apart, and they feel powerless to stop it. I don't understand why the right keeps pushing for a return to the past, as if it were perfect. You don't have to think to hard to realize how wrong this view is. I know things will get better, but my heart can't let go of everything that we've lost. 

A Few Vague Plans

     My mother got Disney Plus recently, since they kept adding shows we wanted to see, and me being me, I did the obvious thing you do when you subscribe to Disney Plus; set about watching Fantasia and Fantasia 2000, two of my favorite films. 

    I love both these movies so much. I'm a huge classical music nerd, and my favorite thing to do when listening to music is to come up with stories in my head, so both these films are very much my thing. I still remember seeing Fantasia 2000 when it came out, and how awesome I thought it was. 

    That doesn't mean I think these films are perfect. They both have a problem where they choose pieces of music that are popular rather than music that short enough to fit into a movie made of shorts, so as a result they wind up cutting a lot. This isn't usually that big of a problem, since the shorts still mostly work otherwise, but it can straight up ruin some of them (namely Pastoral Symphony). There's also the fact that, for Fantasia especially, you really have to be sold on this concept for the movie to work. I don't find the lack of story in most of Fantasia's segments to be that big of a deal, as the music and visuals usually do more than enough to carry the film, but again, Pastoral symphony is the big exception to this. 

    Honestly, I have a lot to say about these films. I love the fact that when it came time to do a sequel, they chose to do it in a completely different way, which really helps it stand on it's own, but that means that the sequel has had a much harder time gaining a following. To be fair, the original didn't become immensely popular until decades after it came out, so I'm still hopeful that Fantasia 2000 will have a chance to shine at some point, because it truly deserves it. I love the fact that Fantasia is so vastly different from any of Disney's other films, which means that it's held up very well, but has had the downside of making it a tad niche. I love the fact that when they put Fantasia on DVD, they restored all of Deems Taylor's original dialogue, even if they had to get someone else to dub over it (in all honesty, whoever is dubbing is doing an excellent job), though it does have the downside of making the opening to Fantasia 2000 a little weird. 

    I've been thinking that I could probably write entire reviews of all the segments. I just love both these films, ever since I watched them on VHS when I was a kid. In general, I like the overall presentation of Fantasia a lot more than in Fantasia 2000 (although it's still excellent), but I think Fantasia 2000 did a much better job on the segments themselves. 

Tomorrow

Nobody wanted the world to end.

It just happened when everyone was watching.

Our leaders ignored us,

Our culture disintegrated,

Our world crumbled before our very eyes.

I want to get out so badly.

I can see outside

But I can't possibly escape

The grind,

The pain,

The feeling of loss.

Why do our leaders not care anymore?

Can't they hear our pleas for help?

Can't they hear our voices

Begging from below?

We gave them their power,

But they seem to have forgotten

The price they were supposed to pay. 

Every day 

Is another reminder

That the world doesn't belong to me.

The people in charge don't care about us anymore.

For what is an atom

To a person?

Every day

I grit my teeth,

Telling myself that this is only for today,

That tomorrow must be better.

But how long can I go on

Searching for the sun,

Searching for the dawn of a new day?

Note: Originally, this was a repost of something I'd already posted before, that I'd forgotten I'd posted. Here's a link to what was originally here. 

    It'll be the first of May when this post goes up. One of those holidays you completely forget about unless you're looking at a calendar. 

     May day. I'm not the first to note that it sounds like a cry for help. I don't know that people want help exactly, but I have a strong suspicion that most people are looking for a sign that things are going to get better some day. 

    I'm not the person to give you one, if you are looking for one. Frankly, a lot of the emphasis that things will get better from people strikes me less as optimistic and more as desperate to believe in something. But I do think that things are going to get better. The human race has proven to be a spectacularly stupid species during the two million years it's been on earth. But in spite of our limitations, we've accomplished a lot. Mostly by not giving up, even when we clearly should have. I can't say I think the next year, or even the next decade, will be easy, but I firmly believe that when the dust settles, we'll get right back up and keep going, learning exactly as much as we usually do from these situations. I don't know where we're going, I just know that we'll end up somewhere nobody else has been before. 

    I saw an article today with the headline "Elon musk might not buy Twitter." Not those exact words, but that was the gist. 

   It would be a good thing if Elon Musk didn't buy Twitter, I guess, but why make us go through so much stress only to reveal that he couldn't do it in the first place? 

   The major downside to being a writer is that you find yourself criticizing every story you ever read, even if it's the story of your own life. Why hype Elon Musk up so much if he's only going to back down in ten seconds? Why make Donald Trump the one to bring America to it's knees? Why does life have so many villains, but never enough heroes?

   I realize it's stupid. I'm well aware that life doesn't work that way. I'm not the one writing the story of humanity, everyone is the writer of that story. What seems like a stupid plot point that goes nowhere from my perspective could be a major, life changing event to somebody else. 

   Whatever I think, I don't know that Twitter will be safe even if it turns out that Elon Musk can't purchase it. Neither is Facebook, Instagram, or any other extant social media platform. All of them we're born in a lawless world, and none of them are ready for the world people want to build, a world where free speech will lose out to peoples desire to believe in basic human decency. 

     Or at least, that's what I keep telling myself.