Headlines

Glancing at the headlines—
   such awful, awful news
of humankind in breadlines
   or stupefied from booze.
It makes one melancholy
to think this world’s not jolly
from Bakersfield to Bali.
   It wrecks your state of mind.

Glancing at the headlines
   you’d think that war was rife,
crossing sacred redlines.
   Oh, what’s the point of life?
Bad water, air pollution,
cars and lorries whooshin’,
the steady dissolution
   of homes of every kind?

Would our great grand kids wonder
   how we made such a mess,
at how we could so blunder
   as in a game of chess?
Would they, on A. Centauri,
giggle at our story,
be not the least bit sorry
   they’d left us all behind?

Meat production’s growing,
   animals suffer harm,
extinction is ongoing,
   filling us with alarm.
Yet there’s less child mortality,
   decreasing CO2
as well as less brutality.
   IQs are rising, too.

Our lives are getting longer,
   less people are stone broke
and, mocking the scaremonger,
   there’s less disease. No joke!
Poverty’s decreasing
   around this pale blue planet.
While freedom is increasing.
   (Let’s let no despot ban it!)

Is sapiens a cancer
   on Earth? What of the facts?
Do you have an answer?
   Do facts dissolve like wax?
Good news, while often boring—
stuff we keep ignoring—
is really worth exploring,
   for then we’ll doubtless find

that things are not as dreadful
as when we had a headful
of headlines like a shed-full
   of ticks and fleas combined.
No, things aren’t quite as dreadful
as when we had a headful
of headlines like a shed-full
   of ticks and fleas combined.

Yet when the sun’s a giant
   gargantuan balloon
on which we’re all reliant,
   we’ll be barren as the moon.
Everything we cherish,
the common and the rarish,
the air and sea will persish
   and peel off like a rind!

Who’ll glance back at our planet,
   the dot that was our home,
with telescopes to scan it?
   Our robot heirs. They’ll roam
the Galaxy through portals—
mechanoid immortals
linked by a mind that chortles
   at the relics of mankind.