An Apologist Poem for Emma Lazarus

Too often in our recent history, our Congress has forgotten the true spirits of America as incarnated in Emma Lazarus' famous poem: to care for the poor, homeless and huddled masses on our own teeming shores.

The cynical among us will dismiss all these as a Lotus eater's pipe dream, a Pollyanna's rosy lens view of our world. It is a Utopian world that cannot be achieved in this earthly realm. Ideals are half-awaken ideas of a daydreamer, they say, conceived out of the hazy mist of their REM sleep.

To these I offer a contrarian view. If you look through the window of history, you can see the domino-falls of Dictatorship, once deemed an impossible dream by the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. You can see a parade of dictatorships, may it be religious, imperial-colonial, monarchial, Fascist, patriarchal, sectarian, genocidal or plutocratic, all fall and will eventually fall before the march of Democracy. Sometimes these daydreamer's ideals do come true.

However, a true democracy can only survive and be sustained through an Informed Democracy, a democracy where an informed, educated and participatory public are actively involved in their country’s electoral processes. A democracy without an informed and educated public to adopt sensible egalitarian laws is a mob rule. A democracy where the minority voices are silenced is a dictatorship by arithmocracy. A democracy hijacked by special interests is tyranny imposed by a few on the country’s multitude. The antidote to anti-democracy undercurrent is a well-informed, educated, participatory public.

It was no wonder whenever a dictator came to power, the first thing he wanted to seize control was the mass media, the very incarnation of the Freedom of Speech. And now, his present-day equivalent, a demagogue, fears the most is his followers' exposure to the truth and contrarian views from the mass media; that is why you will find him frequently assaulting the mass media as not representative of his imaginary "Silent Majority".

Show me a "Silent Majority" and I'll show you a mute opera singer. They don't exist!
A majority may be silent in actions at first. A social quake is always preceded by a lot of disgruntled rumblings before it erupts into protests and riots. Any government should be well advised to put their fingers on the social pulses.

But most of current crop of lawmakers are too convicted of their own moral certitude and/or too intoxicated with lobby money to have the empathy for the average, disfranchised Americans. Our government, as it stands now, is a virtual plutocracy. Look at the influence our big corporations, big money and lobbyists exerted on our Congress.

So, to borrow a few words and spirits from her famous poem, I wrote the following doggerel to show the current political ethos of the voters:

Rise! You disfranchised, working-class thrall,
You tired, over-taxed masses must address
And stand with one voice to command our Congress:
"Give us your coin-tossed, poor lawmakers all,
They surely will not like what is in store,
We hold the key to the Congress's Exit Door!"