The Frog and the Scorpion

A frog and a scorpion met on a stream bank.  The scorpion asked the frog to carry him across on its back.  The frog asked, "How do I know you won't sting me?"  "Because if I do, I'll drown, too" answered the scorpion.  So they set out across the stream.  Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog.  As the frog started to sink, he knew they'd both die.  With his last breath, he gasped to the scorpion, "Why?!"  "It is my nature.  And you knew I was a scorpion."

Americans do not want the facts.

They do not want to hear how many countries

we've invaded for power and money

nor the number of proxy wars

financed in our name for the same.

Americans do not want to talk

about slavery, the Native Americans

or our rape of "Third World" nations

for necessities like bananas or coltan for cell phones

via the IMF, the World Bank and "free" trade.

Americans do not want to see

that compliant puppet governments

and dictators are America's best friend,

that anywhere real democracy rears its unwelcome head

it's put down by demonizing it and its leaders and/or killing them.

(See Mossadegh, Hamas, Allende and Hugo Chavez .)

Americans do not want to admit

that terrorism is not caused by hatred

or envy of our "freedoms", but by our invasions,

torture, exploitation and slaughter,

or that the US sends three billion taxpayer dollars

to Israel yearly to test white phosphorus,

J-DAMS, DIMES and GBU-39s

on the captive population of Gaza.

Americans will not even try

to understand that depressions and recessions,

repetitive bubbles and Wall Street's speculative gambling

are planned in advance by the shameless fat cats

of the plutocracy and the "Federal" banksters.

Americans will not entertain the idea

that American business uses human shields it calls "illegals"

to stave of the threat of paying a living wage

and if they ask for one the boss just calls la migra.

Americans do not want to know

that Main Street was murdered by Wal-Mart and Wall Street,

or that prisons are plantations where the process of manufacturing

is just business carried on by other means.

Americans do not want to hear

that health insurance is a middle man

designed to bleed them into medical bankruptcy,

or that credit is just debt with a fancy name

created to rob them of their homes and their property.

Americans do not want to believe

that plastic is strangling the ocean,

that petro-agriculture is poisoning their food,

that the rain forest's been razed for cheeseburgers,

and that climate change, misnamed "global warming",

warms the "heart" of Big Energy's shareholders.

Americans do not want to be reminded

of the animal holocaust in "farms" that are factories,

which in addition to terror and agony

causes stroke, heart disease and obesity,

or that the runoff makes drinking water a toxic cocktail

of hormones, antibiotics and feces,

that most of the ocean's big fish have been fished

and commercial trawlers scrape the ocean bottom lifeless,

that continual solitary driving of their personal vehicles

helps strand polar bears on the remnants of ice flows.

Americans don't want to look at the fact

that sex, fear and envy persuade them

to buy products that kill them for profit -

alcohol, tobacco, meat and dairy, food additives,

prescription drugs, corn syrup and plastics.

Americans do not want to admit

that love, family, friendship and sexuality

are now no more than profitable commodities,

that wars, sports, TV, shopping and celebrities

are designed to keep their minds off the rape of democracy.

Americans cannot be bothered to discover the political priorities

of people they vote for in the electoral extravaganza,

to look for alternative info though newspapers, TV "news" and talk radio

are talking points and sheer propaganda,

or to acknowledge that the people who "represent" them

have not the people's, but their own, interest in mind,

due to campaign funding's lucrative bonanza.

Americans refuse to see

that schools don't educate for a reason.

An educated public is 300 million dangerous threats

and schools are used to defuse these

by a pre-emptive indoctrination of children

with the wisdom of dog-eat-dog competition

which creates the divide-and-conquer infrastructure

that allows oppressors to blame their own victims.

And since kids might stumble into cooperation and empathy,

those in social programs are deemed weak and pathetic

in an effort to get the victims to agree and accept

that they're the primary cause of the system's effect.

The plutocracy exercises increasing dominion

via consolidation of capital at the people's expense

concentrates it periodically, ratcheting up its intensity,

during engineered crises like wars and depressions.

The United States is no longer the home of the free and the brave

where life, liberty and happiness are pursued,

but of people living in fear of financial and physical terrorism

and co-opted by the carnival of consumerism.

It's a cauldron of inequality, poverty and misery

where lives are lived in quiet desperation,

in free(dom of) speech zones and the pursuit of stuff

in a marked down and militarized nation.

Americans refuse to believe that they've accepted to live

under a system that subjugates, denigrates and infantilizes them,

and that the many creating the wealth at the bottom

are engineered as ignorant, obedient and defensive.

And as the money is funneled up to the few

the many are bought off with shiny oil-based objects -

I-pods, X boxes, PCs, plasma TVs, SUVs,

McMansions, Mickey D's, boob jobs and botox -

strung on a charm bracelet/slave chain

of the non-negotiable American lifestyle

constructed on the ashes our foreign trade policies

have made of other people's rights and their lives.

Americans seem not to notice

that nature has been reduced from The Source

to a package of exploitable resources,

and that citizens are relegated to being consumers

who, in turn, are eaten up by their choices

or that a not-so-invisible hand signs the legislation

that makes foreign and domestic American policy

and turns what started as participatory democracy                   

into a Donner Party version of economics.

Americans don't want

to hear, to see, to speak, or to feel

anything

about what's actually happening to them

or being done in their name,

but most of all they don't want to

THINK

because thinking leads to

cognitive dissonance and confronting the pain

of knowing how the American lifestyle

is, and has been, maintained.

But the aversion therapy administered in schools

and cultural reinforcement thereafter

keeps them safely away from

the truth ,

imprisoned like dogs

with electronic shock collars.

And besides, they're so busy with their shopping,

which is Americans' ultimate function,

that they don't have the time to tune into

what that "little voice" has been trying to tell them

that this system relentlessly perpetuates itself

by means of infinite, unlimited growth,

which it carries on by any means necessary

like a parasite that strangles its host.

It has to kill the goose (that's us)

who lays the Gross Domestic Product Golden Egg

because it's a no-holds-barred, winner-take-all,

every man on his own for himself free-for-all

until there are no eggs left to take.

It's not 'til they're drowning in hubris and debt

and the system turns around and stings them

that Americans are willing to hear what they already knew -

the scorpion is corporate capitalism.

"Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.  It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness.  But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience. he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code." - Carl Gustav Jung

Author's Bio: Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).

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