I Put America Up For Sale!

I make promises all too easily.
Why should a conscience be my guide?
When I break each and every one of them,
I then blame the other side.

I promised hope and change,
and to close Guantanamo.
But now I blame it all on congress.
They are my eternal foe.

When I had the votes to get it done,
I just pissed two years away,
And now my legacy is in the toilet.
Behold, my feet of clay.

There is blood upon my hands,
from the innocent I did bury
underneath the desert sands;
those found guilty by no jury.

I am the judge and executioner;
the harbinger of death.
I bow before my masters.
For them, I’ll sink to any depth.

I am a father to my children,
and a husband to my wife.
And yet I aid and abet,
in the taking of a life.

Don’t ever make a promise,
that you know you will not keep.
Never promise hope and change,
when you’re willing to sell it cheap.

I have made my bed and it is soft.
My nest is feathered well.
I did what I had to do.
I put America up for sale.

Written by,
Shelby I. Courtland
©2015 Shelby I. Courtland

When Barack Obama first ascended to the presidency, the Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. The time to get things done would have been that two year period when he had the votes necessary, but his focus was on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that was eventually signed into law with much fanfare, but did little in the way of relieving so many Americans of the high cost of health care. People are still losing their homes and going bankrupt if they become seriously ill and there are many who fall in the gap of ineligibility. We have here a lack of hope and change.

And yet, where is the concern over the high cost of incarceration? It costs approximately $40,000 a year to house just one inmate and yet schools are closing for lack of available funds. But no one has suggested closing prisons when many are incarcerated due to mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, “three-strikes” laws and the so-called, war on drugs, which usually means, low-level drug offenders caught with trace amounts of drugs on them, instead of being cited, they are locked up. With an estimated 2.3 million people incarcerated in America and the majority of them are African-American and Hispanic, prison has become the new slave pen. How is it that the U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but nearly a quarter of all of its prisoners? Answer: Because they’re Black and Brown people, that’s why. Again, what we have here is a lack of hope and change.

As we all know, segregation is still in play and with the fact of that, we now have what is called,’ the school-to-prison pipeline where mostly inner city children of color are herded from the classroom straight into the juvenile and criminal justice system. They are not to learn, they are to head straight to jail and remain there. That’ll cut down on the need for funding for education especially since the funding for education is being funneled into the criminal justice system. You see any signs of hope and change here? No, just more signs of America up for sale in the form of America’s children for sale to the prison industrial complex.

Although there is no way to accurately count the number of homeless people, those who are attempting to do so, have posted statistics that are shatteringly horrific. According to an article in the Huffington Post, the number of homeless children in America has surged to an all time high and show no signs of abating. More hope and change?

And wasn’t Obama against dumb wars? As opposed to what? Smart wars? All wars are dumb wars because bombing people never solved anything. Ask those pesky ‘terrorists’ that just keep popping up in countries that America has bombed to smithereens and then went back to do it again or never even left to begin with. And let’s not forget the deposing of legitimate leaders if not outright murder of other nation’s leaders. Obama has certainly been heavy-handed with those damn killer drones and it would appear that the innocent are the target because innocent people are targeted for ‘extermination’. Got to keep the warmongers happy. Over 2,400 innocent people are dead because we voted for hope and change and what we got was ‘criminally insane’! Barack Obama, another sell-out, a war criminal, a liar, a hypocrite, a murderer never intended to bring hope or change to the ‘business as usual’ status quo in Washington. Those of us who voted for him are more than likely ashamed that we did so. We were duped because we wanted to believe that there was a chance for change and now we know that there is no hope for change.

Yes, Barack Obama put America up for sale and in the process drenched her with the blood of innocents while the drums of war beat on.