Minorities

Why do we berate minorities?
It could be us, have you ever
Lived in poverty, gone hungry?
Tried to be autistic for a day?

Survived schizophrenia
Been disabled, grown old?
Have you ever broke your hip
And tried to rehabilitate?

Gone to jail and tried to
Reintegrate into society?
Have you ever been black
Or Hispanic in a society

That has predetermined your fate?
Have you gone to college
Only to find yourself
Unemployed and in debt

With student loans and credit cards
That you may never pay off?
It could have been you
Who got cancer while still young

Or suffered from depression
Until your wife left you
Or been that single mother
On welfare and without a friend

Or that immigrant who
Had to work a dead-end job
Just for a chance for their children?
Maybe it was you, who knows.

Fossil Fuel mentality

I heard a man say
We are part of the Environment
He was maybe the truest Canadian
That he spoke for us all

Had the courage to say
The economy is imaginary
Compared to the biosphere
Nobody was allowed to talk

Like that again, the scientists
Were muzzled, by conservatives
The loggers kept doing their thing
Kicking people off of their land

To reduce a wilderness
Into profit, and so the world went on
With pipe-line deals and broken treaties
If I am dumb beside your body, Nature

Know that my kind didn’t appreciate you
Scientists had been warning us
About global warning for decades
But we didn’t do anything about it

Here in Canada, we believed we had it all
Water, oil, space, forests, lakes
But the privileged don’t know what it means
The man went on:

“We humans are an infant species
A mere 150,000 year old baby.”