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27 march 2003

currently reading

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, by John DeGraaf (and others). The most engaging book you'll read (and use!) toward leading a more sustainably simple lifestyle. It'll make you want to drop the Joneses like a hot rock.

Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World, by Greg Critzer. If you read one nonfiction book this year, read this one. Read it to your kids, for your kids, for your loved ones. Learn how America has gradually widened over the past thirty years, thanks to corporate behavior that is utterly criminal, and America's "right" to have it all, all the time. An engaging, alarming, and thought-provoking discussion of the biology and sociology of being big, fat Americans.

What some call a revolution
I call a coffee break,
Happy hour,
Poker night.
Too many people confuse bitching about it
With fighting for it.
If they were in office
Had the money
The vacation time
The means,
The guts,
They would do something about it.
They, too, would have a dream
That was shouted beyond these walls
Into the street
With their tongue held out like a wrist that says
I DARE YOU to take me in, officer.

I want a holster to carry my pen
Because I believe it is mightier than what I fear:
A government by the corporations,
For the corporations.
The people have been blown out of the party
And picked off like candles from a cake.
I am affirmative in my actions,
I will not go quietly
I will not speak softly.
I will not
Just
Speak
Anymore.

There comes a time
To just shut up.
Put the pen to paper
The foot to concrete
The car to highway
The sign in the window
And before you know it
You look in the mirror
Stunned.
“Cool,” you think.
“I look like a force of nature today.
I’m having a powerful hair day.
Today is the day
I turn the tide.”

Check your revolution at the door.
We’re working in here.