JOHNSTONE

They're designing park benches
so that homeless people can't sleep on them
and placing metal spikes beneath overpasses
so they can't be used as shelter.

Jerry Seinfeld says Palestine doesn't exist
and that sometimes socks go missing in the dryer,
wocka wocka
ha ha ha
it's funny because it's a witty observation
about life's everyday little goofy goofs.

Fast food wrappers blow in the wind
like the leaves used to do.

Duct-taped gargoyles with garbage bag wings
peer down at the din of civilization
as we march over the sidewalk sleepers
to our Jobs,
stepping over dead bodies
while staring at our phones
and counting the minutes
til we can go home to our sofas
and watch wocka wocka comedians
and shovel SSRIs into our faces
from large plastic bowls
so the crushing beauty of our world
and the knowledge of our mortality
doesn't topple us like Jenga blocks
and make us weep like open fire hydrants.

In this din they don't want you to feel.
They don't want you to think.
They don't want you to hear.
They keep it all CLANG, CLANG, CLANG,
BUY, BUY, BUY,
WORK, WORK, WORK,
WOCKA, WOCKA, WOCKA,
so that you can't feel your body.
So that you can't hear the songs.

There's bird song
and whale song
and heart song
and lung song.

There's fire song
and sea song
and wind song
and tree song.

There's ancestor song
and mountain song
and sun song
and wolf song,
and lots of others I bet;
I can't hear any of them.

Oh, except thought song,
which blasts through my head
like a sonic homeless deterrent
in a shopping center alleyway,
and,
like them,
I have nowhere else to go.

____________

Reading by Caitlin Johnstone.

There are two types of racism in the west: the kind that's considered acceptable in polite liberal society, and the kind that's widely frowned upon.

The acceptable type of racism is the kind which considers it fine and normal to drop bombs on Muslim families overseas. The kind which sees starvation sanctions as a minor issue whose pros and cons are assessed solely on the basis of whether they will be successful or unsuccessful in achieving regime change. The kind which views imperialist extraction from the global south as the natural order of the world, with centrists and progressives squabbling only about how evenly that plunder should be distributed among westerners.

The unacceptable type of racism is the kind which affects other westerners. The kind whose consequences western liberals have to see.

Reading by Tim Foley.

There are plenty of reasons why we should all avoid using AI, but the push to offload all the responsibility for the ecological consequences of data centers onto individual users instead of just regulating AI companies is typical capitalist power-serving bullshit.

Reading by Tim Foley.

A spirituality that is uninterested in ending war, genocide, poverty and injustice is a dead spirituality. If you hold your time on the meditation cushion as something separate from the weeping mother clutching a small body in Lebanon, you're wasting your time.

Reading by Tim Foley.

They keep saying I hate the guy because of his religion. I don't even care about his religion, I just don't like sharing my house with some random outsider who broke in here out of nowhere and took my stuff.

Reading by Tim Foley.