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DAY OF REMEMBRANCE
It’s Friday, June 11, 2004 . . .
. . . thank goodness.
Do you remember this quote?
"But what I want to see above all
is that this country remains
a country where someone
can always get rich.
That's the thing that we have
and that must be preserved."
Thank goodness.
Do you remember trees
that cause pollution,
ketchup counted as a vegetable,
the savings and loan bailout?
Thank goodness it's . . .
Do you remember
that air traffic controllers
once had a union,
how Israel funneled arms
to Nicaraguan Contras and
apartheid South Africa after
Congress made it illegal for him
to sell directly?
Thank goodness it's Friday.
Do you remember the promise
to cut spending, toilet seats
for the Pentagon
at $640 per, record
budget deficits
and double digit inflation,
forty to seventy percent
unemployment among Black youth,
people who were homeless
because they had chosen this
as a life-style?
I said: "Thank goodness
it's Friday!"
Some have been remembering
other things, all week, like what
a compassionate, kind
human being he was. I guess
these are the folks with
the common sense to get rich,
or be born that way—not
those who select homelessness
as their life-style, or have
the bad judgment to be Ghetto youths.
I said “thank goodness it's Friday,
June 11, 2004.”
And you would have no reason to remember,
looking at the color of the faces standing
on line for hours in Washington D.C.
yesterday, that the majority
of that city's population is not white.
So yes, thank goodness it's Friday,
June 11, 2004—
because they are burying him today.
And now, perhaps, we can return
to the business of remembering
exactly what and how
we would like to forget.
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