Throwback Post Pick

Throwback Post Pick is a weekly feature where I fling open the vaults of past works – no matter the naivete they reflect – and revel in the making of progress! So come, TBT with me!

This week’s “piece” of good news is Silver Spoon Consumed. A piece who’s style – at least to me – reflects that classic type of social commentary that brings to mind black turtle-necks, small round frames, plenty of floor pillows, plums of smoke, and the Greenwich Village of a bygone era.

I feel that its message still holds up to the social heartaches we feel even to this day where people are judged by their class, their color, how much they make, what career they choose, whether or not 2.5 children are had and picket fence secured.

We base worth – our own as well as others – on such a surface value. We think that we can judge each other on what’s indicative to a “certain type.”We put emphasis not on striving for more out of the existential but for more out of the fleeting.

We work ourselves to death keeping up with the Jones’ unfulfilled and set up to fail. We can’t get feet over head out of the debt we inherit from a system that is as broken and corrupt as the people in charge.

We are berated and bullied for speaking a different truth, loving a different way, living a life outside of the box whose corner they would see us all pinned against. A people whose back this country was built upon doing just that! Thinking in new ways and expressing by means unheard of!

Freedom isn’t the second amendment. Freedom is the power to believe, not in what they tell us to or how they tell us to but in a way that reflects and shines our truth in a peacefully co-existent way.

America wasn’t made so that one way and one power could reign supreme, but so that many could live as they choose – as long as it is within the law and respects another’s right to do the same. So that those persecuted could seek a kind of sanctuary in the security of individual rights. (Of course in order to build multiple atrocities were inflicted in the name of hypocritical conquering…but if we’re just debating the most basic of dogma from which our country was based you’ll bear with me…)

There is a social standard of acceptable, what is correct and what is trash. What is rich and what is poor. What is honest and what is good for nothing. And these preconceived notions are ingrained early on. You’re born, you’re innocent, you stop playing with toys, you hate your parents, you date, you get a license, you go to collage, you move out, you find a partner, you find a job, you get married, you start a career, you have children, you get a side hustle, you make family time, you work over time, you pay into retirement, in to social security that they keep robbing, insurance that every day gets more and more sketchy, cost of living rises but pay doesn’t, you still haven’t paid off your student loans, they just eliminated your position, you have to go back to school, change career, retire early, have a midlife crisis, get divorced, get a health condition from the poison they put on our food, because you have no time to be healthy, to know what makes you happy because you followed a path instead of following your heart and now have to find a way to put your own kid through collage so that the cycle can start over, can continue, well the rich get richer and tax your soul…

You see how vs the man this kind of beatnik flow can inspire? I’ve always been a bit of a renegade – in my youth an anarchist some might even say! ;p – let’s just say that early on I challenging convention and suspicious of standard.

Now those institutions are falling. More and more social, political, natural, and man-made disasters are rising up to say PAY ATTENTION! Find another way! Choose a new path, the old is worn out and will only breed more of what is no longer working.

Stop falling for the same old tricks of trap. Rise up, baby, Rise!

 

 

SILVER SPOON CONSUMED

Fear it seems would stalk the seams of a society caught up in greed,

Condemned to possess,

Obsessed to be the possessor,

We put ourselves in boxes,

In levels of rank,

The good and bad,

The greater the lesser.

Falling through cracks and breaking the system,

We define ourselves by the grand ultimatum.

We see ourselves for what we do,

Yet lost, it’s said, are the ones that stay true.

For who we are it matters not,

Wrapped up so in what it $ costs.

We seem to build our hopes on gain.

Financial, physical, means of the made.

Spiritually, wondrous souls,

Laughable to others,

Stereotyped as a life of mad woes.

For when they “wake up” it is said they’ll unravel,

Not able to coup in the real worlds means of survival.

True to the human experience is insane.

But not when that experience is caught up in the gain?

~Glory Anna

Zhang Weber is a wonderful artist you can find on Behance! I was particularly drawn (tee-hee – get it!) to his line & sketch portfolios. How marvelous his features, how intriguing their sculptural essence. Such a great source of inspiration!