“Stop, dear. You are frightening the children.”
is a line written into the family script
of every sit-com ever writ.
Bullies have been ever near creating fear
over those who power they sense may be
greater than their single autocracy;
built into the democracy of the family.
Fear does not subside once children leave the nest.
It persists and blankets adult nakedness.
The brain is an amazing protector
storing fear in a separate chamber outside reason’s own.
Reaching the age of reason is not enough alone
to overcome the constancy of threats that cut to bone.
in family sit-coms Dad was chided, even derided
when his supremacy and autocracy was on display.
Mother and children were filled with dismay
which they treated with complacency
and placated with plots created in funny ways.
Mother tried to soothe the savage beast who though it great fun
to keep his wife and children under the gun.
Week after week, the same battle waged
to bring family under his control.
Week after week, mother and children placated the fool
who tried to instill autocratic rule against the family
whose adhesion to democratic rule, guided by equity,
acknowledged “one for all and all for one” the glue
that held family together against mob rule.
The Republican Party learned a different lesson than I
sitting wide-eyed as a child watching sit-coms.
The Republican Party delights in bullies’ power
to create fear hour-after-hour in the political sit-com
“now daily at a” FOX “news station near you.”
They found it great fun to run games on the wife,
the children, neighbors they despised;
even, neighborhoods and entire nations;
making citizens cry as they watch democracy die.
The vote is going by the way unless we stay the hand
threatening us with Republican absolute rule
Life is not a sit-com. The vote is our greatest tool
to fight the autocratic fool whose fear weighs so heavily
upon those watching freedom-lovers placate the man
who would deny the vote in any way he can.
Even when reason returns, the fear remains locked in place
in a brain which keeps it safe for future use.
The only safe response can be
to stop those frightening the children.
Fear only ends when we stand and fight,
defeat it and subdue it; and thus, destroy what causes fright
so it cannot linger in a safe place.
We must lock away the fear-mongerers instead.
We are losing our children; and, too many can find no safe space.
“Dear Republicans, you are frightening the children.”
annarino writes 
FALLING FROM A MORE PERFECT UNION
Alito’s words stilled my own.
A falling body has no time
to waste on words when breath
is so precious and undermined
by space displaced by diving
thoughts toward a very dark place.
It is not just Roe which falls with me;
but, likely Obergefell, Griswold
and Loving, too. So old,
I recall them all. The sacred tome
which gives the rights owed humanity
is our constitution which gives privacy a home
of safety, freedom and security.
Alito steals them all from me.
The greater fear is that he would say
mob rule would bind our hands again
with state’s rights to up-end a nation’s democracy.
The word privacy does not exist, so he says.
Nor does the word slavery, nor contraception,
nor sexuality, nor women’s and persons of color’s
right to vote and have a say in lives they own;
because they don’t in the words originally
written for white land-owning gentlemen alone.
But that is the point, one no longer hidden.
White male supremacy, and protecting the wealthy
is Republicans’ true north. Which is why
even women support letting democracy die.
Why even kind men still vote for extremist
candidates they know can save their wealth
by telling the most outrageous lies.
Stolen election is not the first lie.
The first was that women and Africans are less
than any white man of wealth could allow
to be free, for fear their fields of wealth
once shared, would lie fallow.
I thought I could no longer write poetry
while my love for country makes me cry
knowing my beloved Law is often denied.
The law is sacrosanct, you see.
Alito’s words mean the courts are no longer free.
And that will be the death of the rights
of you and me, and perhaps the world
whom my country once led toward democracy.
The world is falling along with me.
I am not alone if you join me and vote
for those who would protect us as we fall,
and right the wrong words which stand so tall
we can no longer recognize truth at all.
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Filed under COMMENTARY, POETRY, POLITICS
Tagged as constitutional rights, end of democracy, extremism, Griswold, Justice Alito, Loving, miscegenation, Obergefell, ROE V. WADE, rule of law, slavery, VOTE, voter suppression, white supremacist, women