Simply because it is right (King)

Cowardice asks the question: is it safe? Expediency asks the question: is it political? Vanity asks the question: is it popular? But conscience asks the question: is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor political, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Lies

Lies suffice
until someone speaks the truth.

3rd Annual Independence Day Poem

              "Scoundrels"

sounds comfortably roguish
like old hounds
snuffling in their sleep
over cherished errors
of distant youth

dreams flavored by once-dominant appetites
which linger only in memory
and lightly there
like the one-time exultation of physical exertion
or the egotizing lust for acceptance

teeth rounded and yellowed
embarrassing, not threatening


but these old men, snaggletoothed,
are devoted to the bite…

these old bastards
wondervoid, sharkhearted
continue to hunt
confounding emptiness with hunger

to simultaneously cringe and strut
grabbing with both hands
stuffing what they see of the world
the gold and the terror
into their pockets
into their mouths

Rebellion (Jefferson)

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty . . . And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Stevens Smith, November 13, 1787

On identity & character

Identity is born of decision-making; character develops in response to the consequences of one’s decisions.