---
name: Unsteady
composer: c4lliope
summary: |
  You're sick of your goddamn politicians?

  They're pretty goddamn sick of you too.
labels:
- legal
- sociology
public: false
---

Freedom of speech, the first amendment, is a special one.

> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
> or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
> or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;
> or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
> and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Oddly enough, the inability of our legislature to make laws concerning speech
has made it superbly easy for the executive to use his openly-invisible hand.

If you are already sick of the political discussions this year,
no one can blame you - so I'll do as much as I can to keep from being polite here.

- - -

Please realize, you dumbass,
that the first thing our nation's congress did,
as a legal organization on planet earth -
was decide to censor itself.

If you can realize that,
you'll perhaps see a piece of what makes America a special place,
as much as that reputation has been abused
by the imbecile hicks lurking behind each and every hillside.

You had your warning before, I'm sick of being polite.
All of us are. Political correctness simply upholds the corrections officers,
the private business of private companies who make a buck on
privatizing the national sin,
the profile pickers who keep a color-coded red line
between the admissions brochures and the mugshot glasses.

- - -

At least we can say anything we like about those goddamn politicians,
the electeds who make a career on popularity,
who polished their smiles and grins and handshakes,
for the simple and compelling and crucial illusion
that **they can't hear you.**

Of course they can; of course they know they're despised,
they grew up despising people like themselves,
their role models who incessantly failed,
their predecessors who would not fold into the soil quickly enough.

These people chose a goddamn career based on arguing with their neighbors.
And you think they can't hear you,
see you smirking as you turn your backs on their long commute
to raise your glasses at the bar to the football game on screen,
and as they pass the many sober miles rolling under rubber tread,
they're doing the silent math **on your bill**, your bar tab,
your friends and your career, your bar's payroll and suppliers,
the line at the front door and the lines of coke in the alley.
The logic of the parking lot needed to pack a stadium at this time of night,
the communications required to keep an image on the screen,
the energy needed to course through the cables to keep the lights on,
and to keep the light-skinned side on the right-side write-up.

- - -

And you think they can't hear your derision,
when they put up with it throughout high school
after being silent for too long through their childhood.

You say they're a jerk because they don't raise a glass beside you,
they're a piece of work because they are on call all day,
an asshole because they haven't shared a bed with anyone you've shared with,
corrupted because they bend a rule for a donor instead of a knee to an employer.

Instead of friendship, they choose recognition,
and that goes deeper than you realize.

They recognize the illusions behind your friendships,
how all your peers you met in your church,
how all your sundays call you back to the same neighborhood,
how all your dreams succumbed to the pressures of the children,
whose dependence on you hardly compares to your codependence on them.

You used to squeeze your steady's hand,
and now you both hold one hand of your child,
and then someday you'll make the child choose,
because who can be so close to someone for so long.

Who can be steady at all any more,
when all of us are so goddamn sick?

- - -

Say, pass that orbit around again -
I'm not as dizzy as I need to be.
