Dear Trump Supporters

I love you. I do. I'm not joking. I get your pain. I feel it. You're trapped by corruption. That's it. No way out. Every day talking heads tell you. Every day you're told you're nothing. You don't count.

You worked fingers to the bone. You did everything you were told. But they took your job. Took your house. Split your family.

You're a loser. Everything tells you this. No-one looks in your eyes, calls you sir or ma'am. You've been trashed. Except in the bar. Running up a tab on the credit card you can't pay. Every month you need more booze, more drugs to numb the pain. You have no choice. By next year you'll either be dead or deeper in debt.

At school they told you, study, work hard, and you'll be rich. On the way up, take the punches, you'll win in the end. Keep fighting. Men will fear you, and babes will line up to get into your bed.

They lied. They all lied. They made a fool of you. You can't win. They can't lose. You're blood boils and somebody's gotta pay.

Who is gonna pay? Not the ones who set this up, right? You don't even know their names. I don't know their names.

This much I know.  There's more inside you that no-one sees, no-one knows. But I gotta say this.   I don't love your hate.

Hate won't get you to the top. Won't put it right.  We have to work together to put it right. We have no choice. We have to go back to when things were alright. You had a job, a home, a community.  You had respect.

You have to build a community. Minute by minute, word by word. You have no choice.

 I'm talking about basic civil society, services that allow you to live without fear. Education, health and living wages. Hope for your kids future. Justice. I'm talking about walking down the street with confidence.

Respect can't be bought. Belonging can't be bought. Security can't be bought. You have to give respect. You have it to give and you deserve it to get it back. That's why I love you. Respect. My life, your life depends on it.

The only thing hate will bring is death. Tormented souls with nothing left but clenched fists and high blood pressure.

We have to keep trying to build together. They are not in control. You are not in control. We are not in control. It's tense. It's tiring. Sometimes it seems hopeless. But we have to keep listening. Keep talking.

It's not what they should do or what  I should do? It's what CAN I do?

All we got is the rest of our lives. We have no choice.

Infinite Power - a book of poems

Image: Heroic Journey by Paul Grignon Infinite Power, in Vickers eyes “is not a zero sum game  but a journey / a stone thrown in a lake / circular ripples emanating outward” and the danger of our age is that we have lost contact with that power, made it something to possess  like a personal bank account. In writing these poems she  hopes for a reconnection to that sacred universal relationship. Janet Vickers’s book of poetry, entitled Infinite Power,  has such an accurate title for this is an important, brave and,  indeed, powerful gathering of poems. She is on a search, a  compelling search, that draws the reader along with her as  she questions accepted concepts, ploughs through mankind’s  inhumanity and even tears nature apart in her quest for a core of hope amidst despair. “The distant bird singing,” as she puts it. This need to give reason for continuance is evidenced in  Vickers startling fresh and demanding metaphors and her  piercing questions. Hope comes in the last few words—“love  everyone, hate no-one, move to the edge.” It takes profound insight to come to such a seemingly innocent answer. ~ Naomi Beth Wakan, inaugural Poet Laureate of Nanaimo These poems are at turns thought-provoking, accusatory, or playful in their exploration of topics such as climate change, extinctions, greed or incidents from her own past. The thread always running throughout Janet's work is her commitment to honouring all that’s sacred, whether that might be in the world of nature or in the realm of the human heart.

~ Heidi Greco

This is Janet Vickers’s second trade book of poems. Her first book, Impermanence was published in 2012, also by Ekstasis. Her poems have appeared in anthologies in Canada (Down in the Valley, Ekstasis 2004) and the UK (Refugees Welcome and The Poet’s Quest for God, Eyewear 2016), in literary journals and online magazines. Janet is active in the community on Gabriola Island where she lives with Tony, her husband of 46 years.

To order go to Ekstasis Editions

Consolidating Power through Ritual Contempt For Life

"Well over 250 million people died in the 20th Century as a result of political violence. This includes an estimated 200 million deaths that were the result of people killed intentionally by governments, and perhaps fifty million deaths as the result of warfare. Among governments that were the most prolific in murdering people were the communist USSR, China and the Mao Guerillas, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, and of course Nazi Germany." Hitler, War - and the Holocaust. Richard Koenigsberg.

The complete essay needs to be read as Koenigsberg reveals how violence breeds violence.  It appears to arrive from the idea that young men are born to experience the glory of running out on the battlefield to be gunned down.

Dying on the battlefield has mostly been portrayed as sudden death but that's not how it happens all the time or most of the time.  Sometimes they lie on the field in excruciating pain - intestines falling from a gaping wound, arms and legs blown off, eyes ripped out, faces blown away, cold icy rain on frozen mud.  Or prisoners transported in cattle cars without food or water, the stench of urine, pus, for days, weeks or more, knowing that wherever they arrive it will not be good.

Megaphones spouting the glory of giving your life to war, worshiping the men who designed the battles - Kemal, Ludendorff, Hindenburg, Hitler, who told the people in various words - we do not ask you to fight but to die for your nation.

Now I am thinking of ideologies preached by a few candidates of the Republican Party that are clearly destructive to those who have had the privilege of living in a peaceful, almost democratic nation.  Their policies are not about running a nation but about preparing people for war through hatred and division. Fascist parties in Europe and America are not interested in governing a nation  - they are looking to centralize power.

Why do they focus on hate? Is it because they/we are seeking revenge? Is it because we cannot imagine a world that is just and so we think it useless to work towards a better world? Has the system created the means to destroy us as soon as we enter school through ritual humiliation and competition, so we grow up valuing things more than ourselves? 

Would it be that education, compassion, social justice, cooperation, wisdom and social responsibility would take back the power from those who preach that our worth, our only worth, is when we become the means of aggrandizing the emperor?

Would you like to die on a bloody field or coffee shop with your limbs blown out of reach, or in a cattle car with the stench of pus and urine, or a slow and painful death as a refugee carrying your infant to nowhere? 

Who benefits from this global contempt for life?