By Jocelyn Wilkinson

Backfired
We have some problems
Real life, fucked up, serious ones.

Actually, fucking tons.

Is it our culture?
Is it our government?
Is it our military?
Seriously, what is it?
Because I don’t understand.
My mind is incapable of comprehension
I can find no sense.

The killing, the innocent,
Death doesn’t ruin only the defiled.
Hitting that point,
it ruins society.

Perhaps we encourage it.
Or maybe we just don’t challenge it.
We live, expecting shit to fix itself.

Maybe the problem isn’t the system
or our culture
or the media
or the world.

Maybe
it’s just
you and me.

Checking Facebook or some other shallow mean
to see what’s up
instead of talking face to face
over nothing much.

Disconnecting over a wifi connection
Getting lost in a sea of contacts
Misinterpreting through a message, a chat.

Some things just can’t be said
without the feel of human contact.

We hate.
We isolate.

We
are
terrible.

And beautiful.

We fight for each other, or at least should.
That’s what keeps the balance.

This is not the problem of one, two, three, five, eight people.
It’s a problem of intolerance
a lack of caring
a lack of passion
a laziness
a cynicism.

We are our own worst enemy
and really, do we have anyone else to blame?
Are we born evil?
No.
People are what we make them.

Everything we’ve done so far
seems to have backfired.

We need to change.