The Man in the Mirror

An Economic/Political poem

 

9 am on a dreary Saturday morning. The irritating buzz of an alarm forgotten to be turned off the night before, the rumbling of the subway beneath an ever moving city; and one out-group outcast unsuccessfully stretching to reach the snooze button. Unlike others of his social category, the life of Sean Lester does not permit him to lazily sleep away the dim hours of the street muffled morning. Gradually he rises from his bed to turn off the annoyance, pausing for a brief moment to look out his small apartment window, as a crowd aggregates at the stairs of City Hall. Today is Election Day, a day where people from all over the country gather to pointlessly vote the next batch of “democratic leaders” into office, who, quite frankly, are nothing more than ambitious authoritarian leaders. This year though, the rest of the general public doesn’t seem to have much of a choice in the voting, according to the electronic community that Sean is so frequently involved with, an entire social work made up of different small group cliques. Living in near solitude and having no primary group of friends or even family for that matter, Sean works in accordance with a secret underground resistance, prudently monitoring the in-group of society to attempt to discover foul play or other illegal activities secretly run by the government. Dark times are these, where crime and inflation rule the world and where the significance of a college degree is outweighed by fear, power and chiefly prestige. The current ‘Laize Faire’ leader, falling to the group dynamics of his bribed offices surrounding him, has done little in his regime to combat these harsh elements, paving the way for drug dealers and other unlawful dyad partnerships that issue bribes and in some cases threats to political leaders in order to tie their tongues. One coalition completely controls the lower suburbs, ruling by fear and infiltrating every government agency with their people. With every wall listening and every potential hope for freedom from repression, the current situation was bleak and hopeless, and Sean was helpless to do a single thing about it. Who was he but a single merited man in a moribund world, with no influence and no chance of changing anything, even if he did decide to vote. It was pointless. The main candidate for election was a man named Ryan Sloan, a vicious political leader with direct ties to the Drug Lords, who themselves paid for his entire campaign, although he openly and repeatedly denies it. The only other candidate daring to run against him is an expressive leader, a political visionary by the name of Alan McGuire. The underground group of revolutionaries Sean is working for aimed in helping this candidate in being elected, though the fight has turned much pertinent in the recent months. Having enough of the direction his current thoughts had turned, Sean ended up giving himself a headache thinking so hard on trivial thoughts. Shifting his focus instead on the bottle of Aspirin in his bathroom, he headed there instead. Not being very much an instrumental leader in the triad assigned to the same task as he was, Sean would find any excuse not to do his, as he thought pointless work. Finding the bottle of Aspirin laying on the sink, suspiciously not where he had left it, he didn’t care. Taking the last of it, his headache immediately disappeared. He immediately realized the pills inside had been switched when he looked into the mirror above his sink and instead of his reflection, found a horrid scene unfolding before his eyes. Ryan Sloan, newly elected by the looks of the political banners hanging from the ceiling, was standing on a podium addressing the people, telling them that the Drug Lords are “good for our economy”, and that they do no harm to the general public. His leadership style portrayed him now as the authoritarian dictator he was to the entire public. His plan out of economical decline was to give the Drug Lords money to fund the turn-around themselves; using the rest of the public only as a reference group to make sure his diabolical plans were working. The crowd in an uproar, newly elected Ryan Sloan issued the military to keep control. In a flash, Sean was back in his bathroom, still staring into the mirror at the horrific scene. Bolting from the bathroom in a panicked flurry, Sean threw on whatever he was wearing and now, fully motivated to prevent the disaster of a vision he just had. Running outside to vote, Sean cast his ballot for Alan McGuire, only to find out later that week that he won the election, by one single vote.