Moving, I might add that while the rich skip about trumpeting the
vibrant economy, the average income of 80% of the population has
gone down since the last recession. Put another way the recession never
ended except for those with $10 million the the stock market.
wcm>
> Here is the poem, Why We Are Here, which author Robert Arthur Lewis was
> distributing in Seattle, on the occasion of the World Trade Organization
>
> Ministerial Summit in 1999:
>
> Why We Are Here
>
> Because the world we imagined, the one
> we had always counted on
> is disappearing.
> Because the sun has become cancerous
> and the planet is getting hotter.
> Because shildren are starving in the shadows
> of yachts and economic summits.
> Because there are already too many planes in the sky.
>
> This is the manufactured world
> you have come here to codify and expedite.
> We have come to tell you
> there is something else we want to buy.
>
> What we want, money no longer recognizes
> like the vitality of nature, the integrity of work.
> We don't want cheaper wood, we want living trees.
> We don't want engineered fruit, we want to see and smell the
> food growing
> in our own neighborhoods.
>
> We are here because a voice inside us,
> a memory in our blood, tells us
> you are not just a trade body, you are the blind tip
> of a dark wave that has forgotten its source.
> We are here to defend and honor
> what is real, natural, human and basic
> against the rising tide of greed.
>
> We are here by the insistence of spirit and the authority of
> nature.
> If you doubt for one minute the power of truth
> or the primacy of nature
> try not breathing for that length of time.
>
> Now you know the pressure of our desire.
> We are not here to tinker with your laws.
> We are here to change you from the inside out.
> This is not a political protest.
> It is an uprising of the soul.
>
>         -- Robert Arthur Lewis
> *******************************************************************
>
>
> Creo que el mundo es bello,
> que la poesía es como el pan,
> de todos.
>
> (I believe the world is beautiful
> and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone)
>
> Roque Dalton
>