[Newspoetry] Faith in the Public Sphere?

[Donald L Emerick]

Faith in the Public Sphere
For Education Secretary Rod Paige
to state that he personally finds
Christian schools preferable
for the values they teach
is an appalling gaffe.

Pretending to govern the People,
as if to honor the will of the People,
is not what any of them plan to do,
these radicals who stop at nothing,
to subvert, overthrow a Constitution,
who call themselves Bush's regime.

They will stop at nothing to destroy
the basic foundations of the nation.
Every halting advance in civilization
is to be discarded as if it were liberal
to think that the people have rights
against the artifices of governments,
or government's private sector allies.

The distinction of public and private
was corrupted over a century ago,
when corporations under charters
from the State became as persons,
entitled to Bill of Rights protections
as if they had personal lives or souls.

Restrictions in charters, meanwhile,
were erased, obliterated, dissolved,
under perfected doctrines of profits,
that states corporations are soulless,
as they will do anything for money,
and, thus, nothing they must not do
if there is some money to be made.

A corporation is a thus to the State
what lords, dukes, barons, royals
were to the power of a feudal state:
those who serve Kings become rich,
by grinding under hooves many serfs.

As long as they are part of the staff
of some uncaring corporate entity,
most people do not see themselves
as serfs of a lord's manorial estate:
they think that they are almost free,
except for the taxes they must pay,
and they think the lords are right,
that lowering taxes would be good,
and this could be done so sensibly
by getting rid of all those programs
that always go to help some others,
who are not paying their own way.

Schools?  Why pay to educate
the children of any other person?
Besides, studies show otherwise,
that they aren't being educated,
not very well, not in the abstract,
not in the fine values of hypocrisy,
not in the ways of basic ignorance,
that we call Christian arrogance,
as if Jesus had become the King,
concerned with maintaining power,
concerned with extending power,
in the only way that mortals do,
by deceiving some, killing others,
robbing and looting  people freely,
wasting them away, protectively.

Education is not an indoctrination:
there is a difference between ideas
that require mere familiarity or faith.
Faith blindly denies dissent validity,
but education requires a familiarity
with how ideas work or fail to work.

A person must know the impossible
of an idea to learn how it's possible
to retreat from the foolish absolutes
in metaphysics and other religions:
no state of mind is a state of nature:
nature makes no man believe by faith,
but leaves him free to decide plausibly
what is the possible or the impossible.

The goal that once was in America,
the idea of freedom, was not small.
It was universal, showing itself to all,
that an Enlightenment was possible,
that one did not have to serve others,
that one ought not be forced to serve
because education would free minds
of foolish slavery to their selfish souls,
which needed absolutes in protection,
in order to save themselves of a work
of thinking of what we all ought to do,
to make this wide world much better
for others unnamed, to be generations,
and not for the pleasant enjoyments
of temporary convenience, carnal self.

The promise of education is not private:
as to how each self can privilege itself,
showing fashionably spurious merits,
as to what is the latest faddish rage,
in corporations in need of servants,
to become the highest paid flunkies
of a private capitalism's reservations.

Education does not promise wealth.
Education does not promise fame.
Education promises no material gain
to any person who is well educated.
What education promises is thinking
as that labor that has intrinsic value,
regardless of what fashion dictates.

Fashion dictates harsh commands,
unthinking aggregates as demands,
as to what today can be privatized
that yesterday was in public hands,
once owned as a right in common,
now becomes, disowned, profitable
as an ownership is in less than all,
making it worthwhile to play with it,
by making us pay to access a use.

People who have too little money
are literally quite worthless beings,
who have no merits or its desserts,
so runs the private selfish thinking.

Thus, only a truly free people defend
its public sector against barbarians
who privatizingly go upon rampages,
looting a public sector as if secretly:
Bush inspires the looters of Baghdad
just as he inspires looters of America,
when a Sectarianary of MisEducation,
obsesses on a pillaging yet to come.

Thanks for listening,
Donald L Emerick
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