‘80S LEGACY #poem

Don’t honor Bush II’s administration with undue blame.
Twas Reagan and his merry crew reset our country’s tenor.
Of course progressive opposition clamored through post-Nixon ‘70s,
hot and sure about every error.
The point is, we had that luxury. Yes, there was poverty,
discrimination,
aggregations and individuals in need; but hunger,
untreated disease, was not perceived as righteous penalty
for lack of decent wage. There was real spirit of community,
especially on the lower rungs, but noblesse oblige philanthropy still
held, built civic structures, cohesion.
Neighbors could meet upon moral foundation that made sense,
incorporated well-wrought reason.
The ‘80s brought in a different paradigm,
more wily and wild. Days of cocaine,
champagne, glamour and celebration for sweet deregulation,
when every schemer
could conjure a neo-capitalist heritage of wealth unbound.
Before it was found that
poisonous as plutonium, in the gleeful hands of elitist true believers,
just what we
were free to become.
Since then it seems proportion and balance speed spinning to demise.
Wisdom demonized in mad shrapnel’s wake of
blast-warped brains.
Games of harassing hatred and spitting disdain. Contemporary
Cassandras warned: his numbers are 666.
A man possessed by
Hollywood fantasies. America construed as big screen portrayed,
folie a deux with a nation.
And here those snowy yesteryears roost
in loyal rafters, lay out
macabre future ruled by disaffected youth.
Who is it, really, that we as a people choose to be?
Distanced from encouraging history,
adumbrated by convenient lies, what are our chances
for recovery?