Where is Fair?
Just past the endless rows of cubicles
Where workers spend each day bantering in hushed whispers
About the weather and sports and idle gossip, exposing and examining everything about nothing
Demonstrating how this social apparatus really operates;
Past the elegant and spacious ivory towers
Where the masses jockey for positions of importance and stature,
And the world grinds at high speed with a cacophony of grandiose-sounding words exuding authority
And one can efficiently enter a person’s worth on the next row of data on the Excel spread sheet;
Down the bustling streets full of subtle power plays
Where we constantly assign values to the friends and strangers we cross
And calibrate our brains by comparing their appearance, their ideas, and their world to our own
Automatically as we try to sustain ourselves at optimal levels;
Past the rows of TV’s
Where 200 channels of our greatest hopes and worst fears
Are displayed for our enjoyment and superficial reflection,
As we process the images on the plasma screen and move on
If we have the right package, bundle or lineup;
Past the block of theaters
Where the world plays out in a never-ending drama of joy, sorrow, triumph, defeat, pleasure, pain
As the mechanisms that promote social order and harmony
Continually repair themselves in a constant, impersonal, unconscious drone;
Down the long and winding hallowed halls
Where the directors and leading actors on this world stage
Constantly adjust their respective controls and settings
And make their respective decisions for maximum benefit, greater good
But most especially, number one;
Across the battle lines and through the trenches;
Where those with ideals sacrifice their souls
In the name of king and country
And especially the prestige of their leaders back home;
Across the bridge over the river where the dispossessed set up camp
Where the only source of solace is often chemically induced
And those with access to the mechanisms of power view as a crucial flaw,
A blight to be eliminated in the name of progress, development, control, order;
Through the bowels of the institutions and workshops
Where those perceived as misfits are screened, rehabilitated, punished, rewarded, calibrated, processed
And reintroduced into society with expectations of normal functioning;
Fair is right over there.