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.