Ever feel like negativity isn't really realism, as negative people claim, but just cynicism? Cynicism is the other side of the coin from the naivete that the disappointed cynic recoils from as they try to overcome the fact that they themselves fell prey to unrealistic expectations about how the world should work. It's the other side, because it is just as full of fantasy about the world as naivete is.

The leaders we have now, and the media, both realize the currency involved with promoting this new language of failure that now dominates global discourse. It has been uncritically imbibed by the academic world, who mistake this language of failure for critical thinking. For the media, it is to feed on our sense of voyeurism into the darker side of humanity, the same that causes us to be intrigued by an accident on the road - a 'rubber-necking' that extends the shock value and leaves us paralyzed for constructive action.

For the leaders, it ensures that despite our weak-willed complaining, we are too hopeless and helpless within ourselves to challenge power. Challenging power requires a positive vision, but if we feel that good intentions are the road to hell, we can sit comfortably instead with the warm glow of our television sets and bemoan the state of the world. We can dismiss those who try as misguided fools. We fulfill the self-fulfilling prophecy, and in fact the way in which we seek social acceptance through this language of failure, the way we conform to it and allow it to comfort us and relieve us from responsibility, is our greatest insult to the children we raise today in this world. We forget that their joys are real too, and we leave behind the realities of this world behind those joys. We forget that like them we are frail too, and yet we survive as a species and a humanity and manage to bring to this world great wonder, just as it humbles us with even greater wonder that we are here today at all, and with the great and deep magic of this human life on this planet, on this universe. We offer them nothing, and there is nothing righteous then left to our armchair criticism of the system, one that leads not to liberation but which we then comfort with consumerism, or alternative escapist culture.

Stop this! You see even in my writing, this style of bitterness, this disgust with ourselves as we confront human problems, emerges. I need to change the language of my culture, I need to change my words in this culture. That is what this spoken word/written poem below is about.

Change the Words

I need to change the words of my culture
I need to change the words in my head
I speak the language of the living dead
The wilfully blind
The woefully misled

I need to change the words of my culture
They are talking us backwards
To the crisis of failure
Where the media drink
From the wells of our disappointments
And the leaders reveal un-fulfilling prophecy

I need to change my words in this culture
I shall speak of liberation, and the facts
We are all indigenous to the planet
to this world - we come from nations
We are becoming, one civilization
And I predict, We shall not fail
generations, will prevail
And we shall overcome
Our words
Our wells
Our selves