"I just don't know who to call out anymore"

"I just don’t know who to call out anymore"

Jim Lassiter

May 13, 2021

The lament of the hunter-gatherer now inside the walls
Of the first city-state of Mesopotamia.
The face-to-face accountability of his former life
As a nomadic band member
Now only a mythic memory.

Personal accountability was now mediated
By the written laws and money
Invented and controlled by the elite.

He was now civilized but something primal
In his humanness had died.
His now lonely soul subconsciously stretched
Toward Bethlehem awaiting deliverance
And a return to fraternité.

But true salvation and restoration of his humanity
In the arms of his Abrahamic brothers and sisters
In their love of their one true God,
Never came.

After Rome, darkness fell.
But comfort did not come in the Renaissance,
Nor during the well-intentioned Age of Reason.

Mammon Modernity was the coup de grâce
Atop a slowly steaming mountain
Of consumer trash.

Now in the Information Age we are him.
Rootless, powerless in the gyre
Awaiting the next rough beast.

And darkness will fall again
And the tide shine blood red, again.

Our science, tools powerless,
The God mute.

From the toxic stench of global collapse
We will stagger forth and remember Buber.

And turn to our comrade,
Extend an open hand and once more,
As we did millennia ago within the dusty, sweaty band,
Softly ask: “We?”