THE ALL NEW DECLARATION OF IN(TER)DEPENDENCE

VOICES 2023

For Claude Pélieu and Gil Scott-Heron

It is here as far as the eye can see that the spirit burns. Now is the time for a new Providence. Love’s been held hostage too long. Injustice is on parade. Decency overdosed, alone. Societies thrive on mutual benefit, mutual caring. Let everyone contribute by being who they are. To teach children anything else is a cut that never heals. To collect, stack, count and compare is how generations suffer. There’s no hiding inside habits, hedges. Veils can be seen through by anyone curious enough to look. To keep acting out the interpreted truth is to invite in ghosts happy to let the real truth be known. Pluto makes sure of that.

Sea on fire. Lusty sickening laugh. Death by cocktail party cool. Choked living. To be solely concerned with how everything looks and what’s coming from the bar. People on strings repeat the same scenarios, over and over. Chuckle you. The kingdom is dying. Nothing tender here. Common welfare gone in blocked politics. Democracy swallowed in favoritism. I don’t want to give you my time. To die crushed by a culture afraid to give kindness, doing for likes, afraid to make love, desperate to make sales, afraid to see that what’s inconvenient and hard may be the thing that saves us all. It makes me want to holler.

I declare our government, our times, our incorporations have become destructive and have made true equality for all-that-is suffer needlessly. Our innermost selves have been misled, lied to, made to dumb down, and I will be disposed no more. I abolish the forms to which I have become accustomed, because it is my right, my duty, to throw off the tyranny of that which makes a candid world impossible. Nothing but the public good matters. The noise you make is no different than the noise I make. And I need you to be free to pursue your happiness. I’m going to die on the same planet you are, this Aquarian dreamhouse.

I appeal to an idea supreme, not yet made flesh and in no need of judgment, of valor, or praise, or proving. I ask you to leave one thing behind that creates a sense of play, a moment of joy, for the yet unborn, for those still to come here wide eyed. I will do anything to ease their burden of being ridiculously human. Creatures of the air cannot survive without being able to breathe. The earth and all its peoples need clean water and each other to thrive. How that happens is on us. Nothing will save what I hold dear unless I give it to you first. You will not be able to stay home, brother. The revolution is live.