Another World Is Possible

* Video by Austin artist, Kat Edmunson

If America Could Change Its Mind

No important change of course in American history has ever happened unless someone, somewhere had the audacity to hope that things could be different, that the unconceivable could occur, if people got together, worked hard enough, long enough to make it happen. (Barak Obama)


If America could change it’s mind,
we would x-out —

The assumption one person is more important,
more real, than another.

The rasping corporate backlash against unions,
anti-trust laws, against regulation of profit
for the common good.

The assumption it's OK to treat
other counties as mines, or food,
and their people as cheap labor.

We would fix:
Broken public schools — broken because
if you don’t want to pay labor,
you don’t need public education.

We'd throw out:
Wrong headed foreign policy that has
resulted in seven generations of war, and
the rise of the military industrial complex.

Cheney and Haliburton,
Bush and the Carlisle Group,
for instance.

The Iraq body count today:
89, 077 civilians killed from violence,
3973 American neighborhood kids,
wasted, for instance.

We'd break down:
The giants of global capitalism,
that are a stealth world government
and their Free Trade treaties
that trump local, state and national laws.

Freeport McMoRan and it’s spin off’s
paving the Aquifer in Austin, Texas,
for instance.

If America could change it’s mind, we would
know we have arrived at the tough love
turning point where it’s simply too painful
not to change direction, take our lives back,
take our country back.

Have you ever dreamed you’re waiting for
a train?

It’s dark and ruin beckons.

The train is full, but maybe you can
climb on — you make it, or you don’t —
either way you startle
awake having seen
the last ride out of hell.

If America could change it's mind —
we'd leave this place together and fast
on a train that’s moving
forward, not in circles, not sideways,
and certainly not in reverse.

We'd see:
Jobs in clean energy, public education
which is public and good.

America would communicate with
the world, not eat it, steal it, or use it
as a staging area for conquest.

This shining blue planet would be pulled back
from the devastation of global warming,
by our own, our human capacity for change.

We'd be riding on a train powered
by the sun.

We'd organize a new politics
energized by tolerance, not fear and division.
We'd create a transparent forum
for the public good.

We could wage seven generations
of peace —
peace until weapons are obsolete,
peace until it is a habit of mind.

If America could change it's mind,
another world would actually be
possible.

©Susan Bright 2008

Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-fifty books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.

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Thanks to Jim Simons for sending this.

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