Is there a place you might know

Where the still-loving folks may go

To be just fallible, free, forgiving?

A place where we may the gods arraign

For the hate, the loot, the killing?

Where the fallen pundit, mullah, priest

May not their case plead,

Where reason triumphs on behalf

Of universal human need?

I  search the map and cannot find

A patch of the blighted earth

Where some brute does not with loud proclaim

Destroy what remains of human worth.

I do not think it was always so–

In the darkest times reason did break through

To push the beast of conquest back;

Reason now is the Anti-Christ,

And love is a primitive hack.

Copernicus broached the reasoned world,

The Philosophes made us wise,

But the Capital and the gun they spawned as well,

In close embrace with religion

Destroys their enterprise.

The preferred bigot flourishes,

The  orphaned citizen dies.

I dare say you cannot find a place

Where there is no digital satan,

Where transaction does not the aspirant

Help make a soulless cretin.

---