Ive posted this before. It is, quite possibly, my favorite poem. Dunno why.
Its not a famous poem, or a well-known poet.

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Happiness
Michael Van Walleghen

Weep for what little things could make them glad.
—Robert Frost, “Directive”

Melvin,
the large collie
who lives in the red house
at the end of my daily run
is happy,
happy to see me
even now,
in February—
a month of low skies
and slowly melting snow.

His yard
has turned almost
entirely to mud—
but so what?

Today,
as if to please me,

he has torn apart
and scattered
everywhere
a yellow plastic bucket
the color of forsythia
or daffodils . . .

And now,
in a transport
of cross-eyed
muddy ecstasy,
he has placed
his filthy two front paws
together
on the top pipe
of his sagging cyclone fence—

drooling a little,
his tail
wagging furiously,
until finally,
as if I were God’s angel himself—

fulgent,
blinding,
aflame
with news of the Resurrection,
I give him a biscuit
instead.

Which is fine with Melvin—
who is wise,
by whole epochs
of evolution,
beyond his years.

Take
what you can get,
that’s his motto . . .

And really,
apropos of bliss,
happiness
and the true rapture,
what saint
could tell us half as much?

Even as he drops
back down
into the cold
dog-shit muck
he’ll have to live in
every day
for weeks on end perhaps
unless it freezes . . .

whining now,
dancing
nervously
as I turn away
again,
to leave him there

the same today
as yesterday—

one of the truly wretched
of this earth
whose happiness

is almost more
than I can bear.

PS — i had to look up this word from the article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charivari

Interesting word.

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she wrote a book thats online

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link:https://deepgreenresistance.net/en/resistance/liberals-radicals/history-of-liberalism/

“….
……..In 1776, half the immigrants to America were indentured servants. Three out of four people in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia were or had been indentured, 20 percent of the population were slaves, and 10 percent of the population owned half the wealth. George Washington was the wealthiest man in America.

Groups of people don’t endure oppression without some of them fighting back. This is true everywhere, no matter what. There were huge and fertile populist movements in America at that time, with visions for a true democracy that have yet to be equaled. For instance, the commoners seized control of the Pennsylvania statehouse and wrote the following into their constitution: “An enormous portion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights and destructive of the common happiness of mankind; and therefore every free state hath a right by its laws to discourage the possession of such property.”

And here are a few other facts you probably didn’t learn in public school. Between 1675 and 1700, militant confrontations brought down governments in Massachusetts, New York, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. By 1760 there had been eighteen rebellions aimed at overthrowing colonial governments, six black rebellions, and forty major riots. “Freedom from all foreign or domestic oligarchy!” was a slogan of the common people. “Domestic” referred to George Washington and his friends, the merchant-barons. People knew who their enemies were—most of them had been literally owned by the rich. Contrast their slogan to the following quote from John Jay, the president of the First Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court: “The people who own the country ought to govern it.” In fact, common soldiers mounted multiple attacks against the headquarters of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Nobody was taken in by the government that the merchant-barons were proposing.

What the merchant-barons wanted was a centralized national government with the ability to coercively suppress internal dissent movements, regulate trade, protect private property, and subsidize infrastructure that would drive the economy. What they ultimately wanted was to gut a vast, living continent and turn it into wealth, and they didn’t want anyone to get in their way. That’s the trajectory this culture has been on for 10,000 years, since the beginning of agriculture. The only thing that has changed is who gets to benefit from that gutting.

We need to understand the contradictory legacy of liberalism……see link for entire book…”

I forgot. Multi-tasking is beyond me now.

Just think of me as an old senile poster.

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nittany ram wrote:

Of course, we must keep this in perspective.

I didn’t mean to imply that Dawkins’s bigotry and arrogance should negate his middling performance on Family Feud.

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Do you think Dawkins ranks above Gene Rayburn of match game? What about Monty Hall?

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Well an awful lot of it has to do with the price of Oil.

Also Chavez chose not to completely crush the Neoliberal/Capitalists the way Castro did. So they were waiting…gestating…growing…like one of those Alien babies inside a host…

Thats also why i am not optimistic about Amerika. Even if a bernie gets elected
the powers-that-be will just wait him out.

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