As a writer and poet who absorbs the world and then bleeds out truth, I'm finding it harder and harder to break through the political propaganda that television, radio, and web media has conjured to dominate and control so many minds. I can work around the programming by introducing abstract moral truths, but the moment I reference modern cultural, my work goes ignored.

I feel myself losing touch with a society that I’ve taken for granted my entire writing life. In a gluttonous feast of sensational media
that has proven nearly impossible to extricate ourselves,
we allow the power of profiteers and con-artists
to stream content into our minds that programs us
to accept unprecedented levels of violence.
We celebrate military-style police powers
to remove our freedoms of expression,
the rights to own property at reasonable expense,
and our most basic rights to life under a banner of liberty.
In an **** of hatred and greed, a large swath of society
has proven comfortable with exterminating
or imprisoning human beings for the color of their skin
or the origin of their birth in private-for-profit prisons.
Yes, I definitely feel we are lost in a spiral of human descent,
where there is no end, only torment and death.

-Ron Gavalik