A lawyer apparently disgruntled with his law firm shot 9 people in Houston. (He turned
out to be rabid young alt right racist.) It hardly made a ripple in the lamestream deluge
after all the uproar over the “terrorist” bombings in NYC and New Jersey and the knifing
in Minnesota that killed no one, indeed hardly injured anyone (except the “terrorist” with
the knife). A few days before a young fellow apparently (again) another man obsessed
with a woman killed 5 people, 4 women and a man, with a long gun in a mall. But the Debate
of the Titans was last night so there wasn’t much lamestream time to think about mass murder
especially since both “candidates” favor the Terror War so central to the current break down
of law and order. No where is this more apparent than in Syria where the U.S. (us) military
repeatedly bombed in at least 4 separate attacks (killing 62 soldiers and wounding over 100)
the Syrian army in positions they had held for months just a couple days before U.S. generals
were supposed to start sharing intelligence with the Russians per the cease fire agreement
former Mass. Sen. John Kerry now Sec. of State brokered with the Russians. Now the Russians
and the Syrian Army have surrounded the “rebels”/ Islamist Al Qaeda/Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL
and are closing in on them And the civilians trapped in E. Aleppo (all cut off now with them).
And meanwhile back at the ranch (again) two more cases of police shooting unarmed black men
have been litigated for days by demonstrations (actually largely peaceful with local clergy and
civic leaders deployed as peace keepers) yet Fox (no) News compares the demonstrations to
the rebellions/”riots” of the 1960’s. This forces me to remember being overseas on Okinawa
playing pool in the dayroom with cities all across America in flames after the assassination of
Martin Luther King. When I got out of the Army a few months later my whole extended family
who I visited growing up were all gone from the city. There was no one left to visit there again.
However this was just a prophecy of the mass migrations that would drive 40-50% of the people
out of the industrial towns of Michigan’s S.E. corridor — Saginaw, Flint, Pontiac, Detroit — now
all just hulks of their former manufacturing selves. Flint, of course, just had their old plumbing
corroded after a state appointed manager shepherded them into a privatized water scheme that
had them paying 3 times rates of most places in the country when they live dead in the middle
of the Great lakes the largest bodies of fresh water on the face of planet Earth. Subsequently
a series of similar public health disaster were found in multiple other places around the U.S.
(That is us). Yet even as chronic hard core poverty has sky rocketed since Clinton ended Well-
Fare as we knew it and intensified by the Great Recession of ’08 of the Bush-Cheney Regime
crime rates remain at levels half what they were during the Reagan (counter) ”Revolution” or
Nixon’s days of Silent Majority Drug War (on hippies and black people) law and order.
We “Flee, Flee to Reality T.V./ You better watch out Reality T.V. will get thee/ If you don’t
Flee, flee Reality T.V. Reality T.V. will get thee” and we watch the Debate of the Titans and
I remember (again) those Titans who preceded the more anthropomorphic Olympian Pantheon
like poor Atlas who was put to bearing the burden of the whole All One Thing world on his
bent back even though even back in adolescent fantasy it was impossible to imagine any way
to conjure this strange god a place on which to stand. No Peace without Justice, No Justice
without Peace, No possible Future without Peace, No Possible Peace without Justice, yes, yes
Peace and Justice are an existential necessity in time of nuclear annihilation and global
ecological collapse, No Justice No Peace No Life No Freedom, No Freedom in a perpetual war
that is everywhere on the planet in the GWOT Global War of, by and for Terror
which is nothing, nothing at all but a cruel joke of torture juggling innocence.

  

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.