I rose up from the slimes of the most beautiful beaches you will never see. That was at least a billion years ago, and since then, I've taken a thousand forms, and in the future, I'll take a thousand more. You, too. You can't escape your physical form, what it has been through, and what it will go through. You're stuck on this planet like a piece of dust is stuck to a child's marble. Sure, an accident and unwanted, but everything is an accident and unwanted. The point is how you're going to live with what you're given. The question is not what you could have been given, but what you're capable of doing. Don't ask why you have to be here, on this planet, but ask why you, as an individual, might ever care enough to ask that question.

     Like a fleck of dust, you sit and watch, like every one has, and you take it all in without participating. But now you understand, your "non-participation" was as much participation as any piece of dust. Do you pay taxes? Do those taxes go to wars and prison camps and torture chambers? Do you buy products? That is, do you buy food and housing, like every one else in society? Then does that money end up paying the wages of overseers who whip children in sweatshop factories? Is that food produced by the slaughter and mass killing of billions of creatures? And is it served to you, only after so many millions have been imprisoned, exploited, and oppressed? It comes off of the tray that the slave serves, but now that slave is in some Vietnamese or South Congo sweatshop. And now, instead of a house slave, there is a a lowly paid service worker.

     Slavery and oppression still go on, only since American business interests still make an interest off of it. But you -- do you live off of it? Do you benefit by this foreign exploitation? Do you take part in using those of foreign nations, so that you can live life more easily? Do you work for any of those companies? Do you buy any of their products? Have you ever asked yourself these questions about your relationship to your employer? And when you're gathered with your fellow workers, ready to start work, do you ever discuss how things could be done differently? How maybe you could live, and work, in a way that produces enough for you, without maintaining itself on slavery? Probably just as much as you ask the same questions about the products you buy.

     Does it come out of Capitalism? And do you vote for the politicians who publicly ignore and secretly laugh at police brutality victims? Is it burrowed out of the mines that little, African children must work to pry diamonds? Is it from those who have been beaten by police, shot at by the military, and neglected by all of humanity's "professional and educated"? Is it good? Is it beautiful? Does it love? Does it want? Does it grow out of nothing and then finally into something? Does it take nothing and give all? Does it love, and not hate?

     Is it capable of producing the society where nobody hurts anybody else? Can it make a world where no person must beg another for their rights? Can it come into my life, help me understand these walls, and then finally tear them all down? Can it destroy everything, and in that moment of glorious power, make everything that everyone has ever needed?

     There are too many questions haunting our consciences. And for each, we must demand answers.

--Punkerslut, January 13, 2011