Tag: American culture

Student Debt

You want to cancel debt
But you haven’t fixed the problem yet
Will you take away the sports centers
The luxurious salary of tenured professors
The constant updates and new computers

Our debt piles up
While campuses expand
Education inflation
Loans on demand

What does an 18-year-old know of debt
Their brain hasn’t formed yet
Tricking kids into an expensive education
Before they’ve got the information

Can you cancel the problem without a solution
Will you also forgive the exorbitant institution?

Erase the debt, erase the problems
It’s easier to erase them than to solve them

How will we change the education system
For we must change, everything is different
What we now pay doesn’t get us what we want
An education no longer pays the bills
Our debt stays with us until we write our wills

A student comes out with no opportunity
For what do we pay this enormous fee?
When it’s all on the internet for free
Perhaps college should teach financial security
Critical thinking skills could come in handy
How can you cancel debt without reducing the cost
It seems the point has been lost

Wipe the slate clean
For the American dream
You’re forgiveness doesn’t mean a thing
When the colleges are still charging

More than we can pay
Another student takes a loan every day
Just to get through
Without a thought of what this will do
You’ll never to be able to buy a house someday
But all of this we won’t say
A mountain of debt
An unsustainable way

To grow up
To start a future
Does college really pay?

We are paying till the day we die
We can kiss the college dream goodbye
The universities are getting rich in front of our eyes
Do you see what our debt buys?
A stuck generation
Don’t cancel the debt
Cancel the lies

Make the colleges pay the bill
For they are participating in the problem still
Getting fat checks from wealthy alumni
Dedicating buildings, while the rest of us stand by

First make the cost go down
Address the hole we have not stopped digging yet
Until then we will continue to drown
In student debt

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The Watcher

Everybody is watching me
Eyes in my walls
Holes poked through
An inner view

At once I realize
I’m being watched
I weigh the cost
I’m aware of the eyes

And don’t know what to do
Seeing my inside
When I’m alone
Vulnerable at home

I replay all my actions
All that has already happened
The eyes don’t go away
How long has it been this way

An intrusion of privacy
An anonymous view
A subtle crime
That will go unpunished
The discomfort is mine

And then I wake up with a start
Replaying my surveillance
In my waking state
I realize my fate
I’m being watched at any rate

Awake or asleep
Privacy is a luxury
My nightmare is that everyone can see
I’ll no longer be alone

I’m being watched through my walls
I’m being watched in my home,
I’m being watched by strangers
By my computer, my phone

I’m being watched by myself
At every moment
But who is the watcher?
Are the eyes my own?

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Cancel America

Cancel America
Our cancel culture
Where we can no longer make mistakes
All errors are now public
Forever recorded with high stakes
Forcing us to be censored
Compelling us to be fake

We all must agree
Apparently, that’s the rule in 2020
We can’t have diversity
Of thought, of option
That would be considered a sin

You must say the right thing
Suppress your true feeling
Our values are virtue signaling
We are so afraid of being wrong
It’s easier just to go along
God forbid we offend someone
Say what you’re supposed to say
Ignore the obvious, the science
It’s now more important to belong
The unpopular opinion will just go away

Who gets to have a voice
And who should be silenced
A forced social execution
A quiet violence
Free speech was a milestone
But now you must make a choice
Speak freely without hesitation
Or risk losing your reputation

Whenever someone has a social platform
We dig through their closets
Looking for that one blunder
There’s got to be one
To make their career go under
Ruining lives one misstep at a time
Social shaming with no chance to rerun
Having the wrong view is a crime
The battle has been won
But by whom? Who has won?
This battle is not fun

Are there any perfect presidents?
Has any leader not made a bad decision?
Who among us has not said something dumb?
At one time we were all young
I’d like to think that we are still growing
We all are embarrassed by something we’ve said
Something we’ve done

Does every great man have a dark past?
Can we judge someone a hundred years later?
For their flaws
Erase their names from our papers
Make them pay at last
Humans have the capacity to love and hate
To build, grow, create
And to destroy, enslave, placate
Denying this is childish
We refuse to allow some to participate
As a punishment
Instead of dealing with our sad state

Cancel America
Where media is king
The only place you can say anything
Social media platforms now have the final say
Policing what we can talk about
Putting people away
How long do we pretend like this is working?

Social media has fallen into the wrong hands
It’s too complex, too big
No one understands
How to make it work best
We’ve failed the social test

Tear down all the reminders
Rename mountains and towns
Change the maps
Paint over murals
Move our history around
Dance around truths
And make it seem sound

Can history be erased?
Can we cancel all we don’t agree with?
Wipe it clean
The person who said it might be mean
But they are still here
They haven’t gone away
We can’t take away a voice
But somehow we must make them pay

The more we suppress
We fuel the flames of unrest
We must be able to have an honest
Conversation about our humanness
Our darkness
The flaws of our nation

For if we can’t be honest
If we can’t speak freely
If I’m offended by every opinion
That doesn’t suit me
How can I really listen?
Blinded by reality
We’ve become the emperor with no clothes
When we will address the actual issue
Who knows

How can we tell the truth about our history
If we can’t talk about our mistakes
Since we can’t talk about what we’ve done wrong
It has followed us all along

Cancel America
And our genocidal ways
Make all our ancestors pay
For their greed and cruelty
Double standards that haven’t quite gone away

Cancel America
Cancel our culture
False advertisement of democracy and peace
We could be honest at least
America is a vulture
That eats the poor, the less fortunate
And finds any reason to go to war
But hides it from the people
Yet we pretend that we are equal
We are happy and great
Occasionally we catch a glimpse of our fate

And we don’t like what we see
It’s like reality TV
Except it’s real
There’s no sex appeal

We can’t change by lying
We don’t learn by suppressing the truth
Let’s start by applying
What we learned in our youth

You can’t erase a mistake
We are all human
We need to have an open conversation
Acknowledge the beauty and the flaws
Acknowledge our weakness and silly laws
Hopefully, this gives us pause

To address what has gone wrong
We’ve known all along
This is just a distraction
A bad reaction

The adults have all left the room
And not a minute too soon
It’s easier to create a new problem
Then to address what we’ve failed to do

Cancel America
Cancel culture
Soon the only safe sculpture
Will be not human
In the future
It cannot take place
Can we become neutral
To save our face?

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