A History of -isms

America was always the land of promise,

Crossing the blistering frost,

the frozen Bering Strait,

Thousands, upon thousands of years ago.

Man was always the opportunist.

Necessity driving,

and humanity spread,

Down South Past the Klondike,

Down the Rocky Mountains, To the Peaks of Monterrey, and the Hills and Volcanoes of Poas, to the Golden Green and the Pulsing Veins of the Amazonia, to the Andes Range, and Patagonia

Down to the Land of Fire,

La Tierra del Fuego.

What fierce a land it must have been.

Where mighty beasts roamed,

Unnacustomed to human hunters,

Driving species to exctinction.

(Where have we heard this tale in America before?)

America, where no roads were paved,

where the jungle breathed freely,

Before the birth of -isms.

Industralism.

Capitalism.

Social Darwinism.

Before the Goddamned Manifest Destiny

and the white man's holy right to rape and pillage and expand.

But perhaps it is all men

who pave the road to destruction.

The comings and goings of a proud people boasted in the plains full of wild buffaloe, Cherokee and Comanchee, and their sacred land.

The Aztecs and Mayas and their architechtural wonders, their brutal way of life, they too expanded far and wide, collecting tribute from conquered lands and people.

Before the befoulment of Pizarro,

the Incas fought a bloody civil war,

between brothers,

A great civilization wrecked for power,

Easy pickings for men who conquered seas,

who conquered steal,

who brought disease.

America is a history of transatlantic enslavement,

Of Steel And Fire paving way

For Man to Opress Man.

Colonialism.

It was not until Bolivar,

Manuel Hidalgo,

and O'Higgins,

that a people were set free.

To what?

And then came Guevara, and Castro,

to liberate the Cubans from Batista,

to what?

And then came..

And then came..

The history of man is those of conquerors,

the history of America wrote these pages

in blood, sacrificed in pain and misery,

the desecration of a people,

WE, killed an entire people,

wiped them out until they were a smudge on the earth.

WE, enslave and overthrow,

shackle and liberate.

You may say, "I did not do these things"

But we are born of the same quilt,

Man is man,

and so we are cursed to the duality.

America, the land of despoilers and saviors, of tyrants and salvation.

America is the history of man, the neverending wheel of good and evil,

Perhaps it is not a wheel but an arc,

And "the arc of the moral universe is long,

but it bends towards justice"