Patriarchy

Lyrical laws

respond to clinical hate

and we’ve all been subdued

to believe this is fate.

With corruption and lies,

they’ve streamlined our lives.

Their message is subliminal,

and the destruction is cyclical.

So if the future looks abysmal,

it’s because profit is only fiscal.

Once upon a time, the earth was ruled by women. It seemed natural back then, before the agricultural, industrial, and technological revolutions. People migrated, like birds, to wherever the food grew. Before home was where the heart is, it was where hearth was. And that’s mostly what mom did when she wasn’t breastfeeding or giving birth. There were no corporate ladders to climb, only gathered produce and meat dad brought home from the hunt to stew and store. She wasn’t expected to do what a man did, because men couldn’t do what she did, which was, ultimately, invent society.

She used her intuition to rear the children into able adults who participated in the livelihood of the community. There were no surnames, and if there was marriage, it was founded on a solid foundation of trust and cooperation. What was good for mother was good for father and child alike. She created the notion of family from her very womb, with nothing but the mammalian instincts she was born with. Certainly things were not perfect.

Communities grew into civilizations through the adoption of agricultural techniques that allowed people to begin a sedentary rather than nomadic lifestyle. These civilizations thrived best in temperate climates, where food could be grown year-round and sustain the population. Eventually, one territory expanded to the point that it collided with another, and more or less, this is where the notion of war was born. Men no longer hunted the way they once did, yet their primitive evolutionary drive to hunt prevailed.

Slowly, men wrested the matriarchy from the mother’s grasp in the name of political gain. Fast-forward a few centuries and you get the industrial revolution, which further drove the matriarchy into history. The home was no longer the hearth, merely a place to rest. As men worked more and more in societal constructs built for the sole purpose of manufacturing more, more, more, women lost their power as societal progenitors at the same rate. Decisions were now made by politicians, rather than families and their affected communities. The voices of women became a distant echo.

We see all around us the folly of production for the sake of consumption, and it does not seem beyond reason that the women who witnessed the earliest signs didn’t see this ultimate demise. They were not heard. Today entire generations of children mourn for the loss of families killed by wars waged in the name of this industrial riot. They grieve for a future that has been taken from them. Scientists estimate that we will not have an economy, society, or environment to argue about in 25 years. My daughter is 3 years old. She will be exactly my age when the planet becomes an uninhabitable wasteland.

Women have, in recent decades, found their voices magnified by the sheer numbers of our masses. Yet powerful men still manage to shout over us, despite the fact that women outnumber them 2 to 1. That is simple science. The X chromosome is twice as likely to survive the volatile conditions of the womb as the Y chromosome. So even though we are the majority, our insight on these matters is heeded half as much. A passionate woman fighting for the rights of her grandchildren to breathe clean air is seen as radical and dangerous. Meanwhile, a man who has faced 22 sexual misconduct lawsuits is elected as president, and allowed to begin committing genocide against South Americans with impunity.

What happened to liberty and justice for all? Do the words inscribed below the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” mean nothing? If we want to call ourselves a Christian nation, tell me, what would Christ say about the decisions our leaders have made?

There is something terribly wrong here. Those who favor exponential growth despite the reality that the planet can not sustain that growth call themselves the “moral right” and label the people fighting for humanitarian justice “socialists” and “libtards." The very nature of their petulant backlash is evidence of their lack of thoughtful discourse. What is there to be gained in terms of profit, if all the land they have invested in is destroyed or infertile?

Please, in this, the Modern Dark Age, do not let a politician politicize what should be obvious. Do not let an onslaught of childish rhetoric deter you from the truth. As Emma Lazarus, the woman who penned the poem Colossus once said, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” If the planet dies, we all die, too.