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For Every Baby Born

By Wil C. Fry, 2017.03.21, 22:07

(Copyright © 2017 by Wil C. Fry. All rights reserved.)


I rage
I mourn
I weep for every baby born
Their landfill-bound plastic lives1
Their coal-clouded carbon-filled skies2

We held snowballs3
And we told lies4
We passed laws to hasten their demise5
We traded their lunches6 for war machines7
And funded corporate tax cuts instead of vaccines

We make America “great”
By dumping waste into lakes8
And hope to make it harder for gays buying cakes9
I wonder if we even know what’s at stake
And what kind of sound will a failing nation make?

Someday they’ll grow
To spend and toil
Paid just enough to afford to buy oil10
And eat what’s grown in polluted soil
Never sharing in the cash-hoarding spoils

They will age
They will die
Even earlier than will you and I11
While the population continues to multiply12
The weak-hearted need not apply

I rage
I cry
For the old and sick not allowed to die13
We force them to suffer under watchful eyes
Claiming vague commands from beyond the skies





The first three lines popped into my head as I was lying down to sleep on 2017.03.14, so I quickly wrote them, followed by two more. The next evening, I added three more lines. The following day, I added two more. Then I let it sit for a few days before continuing. Still, only a line or two would come each day.

(This pattern is unusual for me. Typically, I write a poem in one sitting, and either leave it as-is or polish it later. Other times, I’ll write a first half and then add the rest later.)

Some sources for the claims:

  1. Salon, 2016: The average American produces 4.4 pounds of garbage per day — 1.4 billion pounds daily, for all 320 million of us. That adds up to 513.9 billion pounds per year, equal to the weight of more than a million blue whales. And quite a bit of that garbage was never intended to be used, but was manufactured purely to be thrown away (for example, the plastic clamshell cases that many electronic items are sold in).
  2. U.S. EIA, 2015: In the U.S., burning coal prodcues 71% of the greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity-generation sector, and greenhouse gas emissions are increasing at a record pace, worldwide.
  3. CNN, 2015: Professional climate-change denier Jim Inhofe (also a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma) brought an actual snowball onto the Senate floor in order to “prove” that global warming is a fraud.
  4. NY Times, 2017: TAINTUS told a record 103 lies during his first 10 months in office, compared to only 18 for Obama in eight years.
  5. L.A. Times, 2017: Republican mascot and con-man Donald Trump (while temporarily president of the U.S.) proposed a federal budget that would cut the EPA’s budget by a third, eliminating many environmental protection programs outright and gutting others to the point of uselessness.
  6. USA Today, 2017: Republicans, while controlling the White House and both houses of Congress, proposed to outright eliminate 62 agencies and programs, including funding for reduced-price school lunches and many science and health programs.
  7. NY Times, 2017: Republican administration hopes to increase military budget by nearly 10%, despite the U.S. military budget already being larger than the next 10 countries combined.
  8. The Hill, 2017: Republicans in Congress, with help from some Democrates, overturned Obama’s “Clean Water Rule”.
  9. the guardian, 2015: As a rule, Republicans in the U.S. are opposed to same-sex marriage in any form, and most are unhappy with court rulings that found against bigoted bakers who refused to bake wedding cakes for gay couples.
  10. Alternet, 2014: The very wealthy are collecting more wealth rather than creating jobs or reinvesting in the societies that created their wealth in the first place.
  11. The Washington Post, 2017: Life expectancy in the U.S. has leveled off, while it continues to rise in most other nations.
  12. United Nations, 2015: The world’s population, currently at 7.3 billion, is expected to cross the 10 billion mark in the 2050s or 2060s.
  13. Wikipedia, 2017: The vast majority of U.S. states do not allow suicide, even for terminally ill patients. No state recognizes a right to die.




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