Arise

Arise ye phantoms of alienation,
And hack out the pith of this aberration,
This sickly old oak that we call Our Nation.
The core is rotten: It ignores reality,
Encourages falsehoods cloaked in banality,
And promotes a simmering, widespread brutality.
It poisons the sap with misconceptions,
Inverted logic, and blatant deceptions,
Trumpets fairness for all, then makes exceptions.
This tree may be planted in history,
But it thrives due to manifold ancestry
And the tolerant light of the sun. It's a mystery
How it survives such rancorous shifts,
Bigotries, backslides, and bully-boy rifts;
Too often we yield to those negative drifts.
Cutting it down would be a shame,
But more shameful would be endless years of the same:
Season in, season out sprouting hatred and blame,
Outmoded biases blooming anew,
Branches bent from the weight of a noxious dew,
Beetles drilling through bark, leaves tattered and few . . .
Best to truncate the trunk of insanity
And let acorns fall freely, so they may be
The roots of a stronger democracy.