The Collateral Damage Of An Ordained Progress

Were good with committing a majority of world population to an inescapable $1 a day existence

Yet, were told that the wondrous ingenuity and creative energy of our people was our greatest asset

Made sure our biggest strides in any subject were for the butchering of each other on massive scales

Unable to stop slaughtering each other, our very habitat became legalized mass collateral damage

We channelized every major river and converted them all into drains for our toxic daily wastes

Clearcut all the old-growth forests for ticky-tack development and/or subsistence firewood

Blindly leveled both natural and man-made structures during our constant internecine warfare

While the Chinese depended on laughably unreal growth rates simply to stave off vast social unrest

Wiped out almost all the whales, poisoned their milk and clamored to hunt down the rest

Songbirds and raptors disappeared in what seemed like silence, given our own ever-increasing noise

Amphibians were extinguished via our fungi, chemicals, climate change and wetland reclamation

But, in terms of protection, the fundamentals of our economy still remained our highest priority

Squeezed the great cats we so admired into ever more fragmented and marginal habitats

Even the vast world ocean was polluted, stripped of its life and its breeding grounds destroyed

Our own population carelessly bloomed well beyond the supporting earth’s carrying capacity

Nonetheless, we had to chose to focus upon lowering unemployment rates and family food prices

Polluted and wasted the very fresh water we needed each day for our own simple survival

Covered unplanned cities in gloomy blankets of their own choking and poisonous wastes

Managed to alter the gaseous balance of the entire atmosphere in record time…

And committed no precious resources to that disaster by labeling it as natural or part of His plan

Invented and franchised ironclad religions to enslave man’s innocent need to faith

Destroyed the living soil in a thousandth of the time that it took to be created

Blindly became the first biological organism to cause a mass extinction on this planet, our only home

Offshored our workers with the fairytale of freeing them up for the higher-paying jobs of tomorrow

Ignored history and family wisdom and then re-created their mistakes on grander & deadlier scales

Replaced iron-fisted totalitarian control with the ethnic cleansing of newly-liberated lands

Spoke glibly of the pipedream of peace while spending more on armaments each and every year

Made tough & incontrovertible political decisions in private dialogues with a mass personal savior

Replaced stodgy manufacturing with go-go financial services and saw CEO bonuses explode

Pioneered negative savings rates as a convenient and necessary source of income

Proclaimed that a vapid consumerism was the very foundation of our ever-growing economic miracle

Deregulated the giant banks who got rich gambling, went bankrupt and then squealed for bailouts

Pumped newly-printed easy money into the financial shams we deceivingly declared too big to fail

Blackmailed them with stock market crashes until we got our huge, no-strings-attached payouts

Saw all these things as small prices to pay during our sanctified pursuit of sacred individual happiness

Lived in smug contentment, marginalizing with soundbites & cynical smirks any and all who disagreed