Globalization Part III

The sprawling ruins
of Bethlehem Steel
hugged the Erie shoreline,
deserted with the haunting air
of a conquered fortress.


Smokestacks silent and clogged
with rust, glass windows shattered
by the lake's unrelenting winds
and tall weeds the only occupants
to be found behind
the barbed fences.


Chad stood dazed outside
the rusty gates.
Growing up in Buffalo
he recalled half his family working
at the abandoned plant.
There was even a time
he thought he would too.


But the plant closed leaving
thousands of Buffalonians
out of jobs.
And others followed suit
until this part of Erie shoreline
(Lackawanna it is called)
was left to homeless ghosts.


In many ways
the desolate factories
and Chad were the same:


Both victims
of broken promises.
Both nullified
by othere determinisms.
Both robbed
of their dreams.
Both survivors
in body.


In a flat world
the casualties of war
are seldom counted
in body bags.


Chad now saw
in the cracked red bricks
the scars left
from wounds inflicted,
amputeed soldiers bound
to their fates
with little hope beyond
the rusty gates.


"How could I have not seen this"?
he upbraided himself.
"All the times I looked the other way!
All the times I thought
of only myself and my
University of Chicago degree,
as if my "security" was
the only security that mattered."


Chad felt desperation exuding
from the red-bricked walls,
as if the ghosts were begging
for his help.
It echoed his own despair
of giving up his robes-
no different from thousands
who had punched their
last time cards.


Not to know where
the next meals would come,
the next month's rent
or children's clothes, nor
for what the future holds.
Like Chad there was
no job to pay
for school loans.


Chad swallowed hard
trying to get by
the lump lodged
in his throat,
to quell the nausea
deep in his gut.


It was too much to bear.
Too much to understand.
How so mant dreams
could go awry,
so many futures
abruptly end.


What lack of care?
What lack of reason?
What breed of scurrilous greed?


In a flat world
there's no guarantees
beyond the moment.


Chad was starting
to understand.


It had become
all too personal.
As though fate
had led him
to the precipice
that he might see
the maw of the abyss:


The abondoned factories left
to rot and decay,
the displaced and jobless,
homes broken
from financial collapse,
less revenues for wherewithal
to educate the next class,
Lake Erie too polluted
to drink or bathe,
the smoggy air
he once breathed
and never once objected.


In a flat world
it's easier to live
with closed eyes.
To pretend all is well.


But there's always
a leveling process.


Always a virus
ever changing,
ever mutating.


And so contaigon spreads.


Strangely,
Chad sensed relief
he wasn't among the weeds
trapped in oblivion.


Though wounded
and to the brink of defeat,
he nonetheless stood free
beyond the rusted gates
of the conquered fortress.
~~


A flat world
depends for its survival
upon contaigon.


In a flat world
there must be agreement;
agreement to be,
to do and to have
as agreement dictates.


Thus contaigon spreads
to make the world
ever flatter.


A flat world
is neither natural
or native.


It is learned.
~~


Copyright 2009 Francis Don Daniels
All Rights Reserved.