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Tag(s): Consciousness - Enlightenment; Corruption; Poetry; World Issues
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July 25, 2006 at 08:40:29

One Bye One

by Jim Bush Page 1 of 1 page(s)

www.opednews.com

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One By One

They stood there with their noses in the dirt
They huddled like hogs, with vacant looks on their faces
They rooted through their lives like pigs in the yard

They picked at their pimples
They poked at their butt-holes
They stuffed their faces with garbage

They drove their toy cars
They watched their toy TVs
They played with their toy guns

They doodled
They diddled
They piddled around

They argued
They fretted
They worried about nothing

They watched the news
They ignored the news
They acted like the news was not them

They let themselves soil their world
They let themselves become dumb to their world
They let themselves become the killers of their world

They denied everything
They allowed everything
They contributed to everything

Then one day...

One of the hogs stood up and became a man
He looked around at the backs of all the other pigs
He raised one arm and started to speak in a very loud voice:

"Hey, you root hogs!" "Stand up, you pigs!" "Become human again!"
"Look at me!" "I'm standing here!" "I'm not really a pig!" "I'm standing!"
"We don't have to be hogs!" "We can stand up!" We can walk upright!"

All the other hogs just ignored him
They all went about the business of busily rooting
They were too busy snorting to hear what he tried to say to them

So he bent back over and resumed rooting and snorting like all the rest
And they all kept clumsily moving towards something they could not see
Something that they could have seen, if they had raised their heads and stood up

But...

They didn't raise their heads
And they didn't stand up
And when they reached the edge
They all quietly tumbled over, one by one

Jim Bush is a 61 year old, Vietnam-era veteran, currently living in Katy,Texas. He was raised in a military family. His father received the Silver Star for directing troops while under air attack at Clark Field in the Phillipines, survived the Bataan Death March, and spent three and a half years in a Japanese POW camp. He also received the Purple Heart for wounds received while a POW. Jim served as an army photographer in Okinawa and Korea. In 1987 he traveled to the war zones of Nicaragua with a veteran's group dedicated to stopping the Contra War.