culture of fear

I sense a culture of fear,
where brown equals danger
and danger equals fright
and fright boils down into
the carbon solid hate.

what tornado has torn through
your rights?
what trampling of dignity have
you endured?
what disgrace has this society burdened
your future?

there might have been a time when
there were no gods on land to look up to,
where the skies filled expectations
of what we wanted in this short blip on an
oval of a big rock spinning erratically around
a star.

there might have been a time when
we didn’t lay into one another with verbal abuse,
where the colours simply reflected those in nature
of the diversity of our own kingdom.

and yes, we’re doing perhaps better than
hosing each other down to wash off the
indelible ink of human birth.

but we shouldn’t be happy with our
culture of fear.
we are cooking in a cauldron that has
been blackened with age,
stained with the past concoctions
mistakenly thrown together in the hurried attempt
at survival.

we drink what we brew,
and the bitterness is nothing more
than the first taste.
be warned, I tell myself, of
what dangers may come,
when ignorance breeds jeopardy.