Survey

Excuse me, do you have a few minutes
To answer some questions
Toward a more loving future?
Great, great, thank you for your time.
I assume you had a choice.

First off,
In the Gregorian calendar, what year is it?
Oh, yeesh. What a year that was! Is.
Anyway, second question:
Is this place still called --
Now I know I'm gonna mess this one up
So help me out, I wanna get it right --
Ama-reessa?
Amer-eyeka?
America, huh. OK, I'll send that up the chain.

Next up:
Raise your hand if you speak at least one of the following languages:
- Chinukwawa
- Ojibwemowin
- Nahuatl
- Quechua
- Guarani
- Diné bizaad
- Maya
- Tzeltal
Hm. Hm. Alright. Noted.

Now, raise your hand if you only speak
Tongues brought to Turtle Island by genocidaires.
Really?
Colonial paucilinguism is that prevalent?
Well, I guess that's why my job had me learn Angelfish.
Excuse me, English.
I've only been doing this for thirty-some years,
Cut a new-timer some slack.

This survey here is but a small part
Of a grand plan to discover
What the fuck is wrong with us.
Between today and the tomorrow from which I hail,
We forgot a lot, and we lost a lot,
And we might have fixed a lot but
Not even turning the blood in the soil to fruit
Could keep the ghosts in the plastic from screaming.
We might have gleaming towers built from joy
And libraries aplenty with lifetimes of poetry
And cuisines beyond counting, who know how to season,
But it could always be better.
Your responses today will help us
To tend forests so long we will call them ancient
On lands where today span only desert and concrete.

We think that if we can remember the past,
We can grieve for it, and mend epigenetic lesions.
Do you know what that means? Epigenetic?
It means that when your parents hurt,
You hurt. And you hurt your children,
And they hurt. And they hurt theirs,
And they won’t understand why.
It takes dozens of generations to heal those wounds,
And nothing really keeps us from slipping back
Except each other.
So we might have abolished war and poverty and starvation and plague
And the systematized cruelty you loosely describe as
Capitalism,
But it hasn't made us particularly kinder, or wiser.

When you run a society with horizons measured in geologic eons,
What you consider an existential threat changes.
If we can't trust ourselves to love each other through thick and thin,
Then someday the human social fabric, which at its core is love,
Will fail like a plane crashing,
Crumbling on a shattered runway,
And everyone who might fix it won't see the point in trying.

So, with that in mind, I have two final questions:
Do you love yourself?
Why or why not?