Beacon—On Laws, Treaties and Trust

Good people don’t need laws to tell them to act responsibly….and bad people will find a way around the laws. —Plato

You can't trust water: Even a straight stick turns crooked in it.—W. C. Fields

Like New Year’s resolutions—laws, treaties, and commitments are constantly being broken as the year moves forward and history is being written.

A promise is a fleeting proposition—presented with conviction and trust but bent like a river breaking into tributaries of hypocrisy, deceit, and betrayal.

How do people govern in the early 21^st Century—with their hearts, their minds or their pocket books?  A nod of the head, a handshake, or the stroke of a pen determines the fate of individuals caught in the vortex of a power vacuum.

Congress  votes on bills that will enrich their bank accounts; a president decides to turn his back on 194 nations trying to save the planet from apocalyptic climate change; 700,000 young people brought to the United States by their undocumented immigrant parents live in fear that they will be deported.

Friends, neighbors, and families—tribes, congregants, and countries peer over the fence to read the face on the other side. Is it a friendly smile, or is it a mask that can change with the wind—sunny today—cloudy with rain likely tomorrow?

Beacon

Poems, polemics, propaganda, panaceas, technocracy, terminology,  umlauts,  

tildes, cedillas, commas, apostrophes, parentheses, periods,

rules of order— blueprints for anarchy.

Cut, sliced, shredded, copied, deleted, libeled, burned, misdirected,

misinformed, misunderstood, turned, twisted, tangled, 

repositories of cognition—food for tears.

Wells, basins, reservoirs, pools, arteries, ducts, tributaries, eddies, swells, 

tides, neurons, lobes, emigration, immigration, migration,

a transitory confluence—flowing with impunity.

Treaties, covenants, accusations, appeals, logic, irony, seduction, anthems, epithets, sermons, elegies, declaration, defamation, deification, 

written on parchment—etched in stone—signed with the wind.
                                                                                                       —Jeff Key