I once trapped myself in an echo room

Said some words
Heard some words
Spoke a verse
returned a verse
I wanted to converse
With myself
Yet it made things only worse

What I expected
Was not what came true
For every me
There was a you
For every yes
There was a no
For every high
There was a low

And I grew suspicious
Of the vicious
Malicious
Tone at which those words were uttered
While my say was muttered
Watered
down
Spoken like a sad clown
With a frown
On my face
That grew deeper with every brazen
Contradiction that I got
Though paradoxical it was not

Because I realized soon enough
That I’m the one who said this stuff
And the reason I was being so rough
So tough
Was because I didn’t listen enough
To the different sides of me
All two, three
Or four, five, eight, ten
Perhaps even a thousand of them

Yet how do they expect me to!?
I don’t know what to do
I’m just lost and confused
In the middle of a tug of war
A war
“To determine who you are”

Today we all gather to listen to the merits(?) of mining the Iron Range
Not for iron, but for copper and nickel and other precious metals.
Are these metals more precious than clean water?
Are these metals more precious than our pristine wilderness?
Are these metals a legacy of what is to become of our planet Earth?
We have taken the oil and turned it into plastic that cannot be broken down and turned back into nature.
We have burned the coal to perpetuate our desire for more and more comfort via air conditioning and heat.
We have polluted our atmosphere, melted our icebergs and glaciers
Destroyed our coral reefs
And now we want to risk the pure waters of our northern wilderness
Reaching out to Lake Superior, Hudson Bay, the Mighty Mississippi
And our entire planet.
Why not keep a tiny part of our planet clean so that our children can say-
Look, this is what we once had, this was Eden in our parents' time.