By Graham Sarasy

It was only ten years ago that we all stood looking at the coming decade with glowing eyes and expectations, the future was so full of hope, and now the past is so full of pain. We can see now that the world is changing, the old status quo, slowly unraveled and rewoven, a thousand tiny times, by a thousand tiny people. We started off strong enough, a cowboy at the helm. Money for all! Was the mantra of the time, easy money, big money, hard money, cold money, money for you and me. But then things finally boiled over, and people showed how much they hated our extravagance, the day we all became New Yorkers. The sweetness of success turned to blood, and then to oil, we wanted war, and war we had, against an invisible foe with invisible allies. We started off cheering, for revenge would be ours! But it was not to be. We got bored, we went on living, we went on dying. The banks of the Euphrates ran with oil, and we had plenty more tanks to go ‘round, so we invaded, found nothing, then plopped down and made a mess like an infant with a stack of cards. Now it’s cleanup time.

The problem is, that we aren’t at war, over there maybe, but not here, in the cocoon of television everything is fine. It’s easier to forget about us over there, because it’s not us, it’s them. Life trudges onward, people are still people, liars are still liars, but rich men only get richer. And the war went on.

Things go up, then things go down, then down, then down. One day, banks stopped caring, money stopped moving, and people stopped laughing, and the whole place ground to a halt. Things jumped out of nowhere, out of the fine print, and the man stepped in to stop it. But it was election time, and change was the word, and no man so young and black was so crisp on that day, but change doesn’t happen if people don’t want to stand up. And the war went on.

The politics kept politicking, and people got angry at anything that the monkeys on TV told them to. They jumped up and down, raised their fists for a cause that they did not understand, voted for someone else, and the people lost. And the war went on.

Here we are, stuck in the middle of so many people, so many angry faces, staring each other down on proxy warzones, in voting booths, on the air, in the air, off the air. The people lost their thought, lost their minds, lost themselves. The facsimile of who they should be was sold back for the low price of 29.99. And the war went on.