What troubles have you brought upon yourself?
With your machines that spew black smoke?
You have broken from nature.
You have broken from the past.
Listen!
Can you hear the powerful sounds of the locomotive
Swiftly crossing the river?
No longer can you go back to simpler times.
This is progress you say.
Progress to what?
We have new medicines
With technologies to get things done
Quickly and efficiently.
Now we have time to ponder the mysteries of the universe.
At what cost?
Coal soot blackens the sky and trees.
The peppered moth had to change its clothes for you.
Classes separate.
Those at the bottom are miserable
While they work and toil in the mines and factories.
Those at the top happily counting the money
That they earned on the backs of the poor.
All services for the poor are work.
Children work.
Women work.
Men work.
All in dangerous conditions.
What is the loss of a hand to you, factory owner?
What is the loss of a life?
Just a machine part to replace.
They are expendable.
Just a new fabric dye for your textiles.
People see that their clothes are dyed in blood.
People see the mummified corpses used for paint.
Yet many ignore it.
But the writers
They are watching.
They know what’s happening.
They cry tears of black ink onto their pages
Marx and Engels
Wrote about change in government
They spoke of economics.
Dickens wrote of social change.
Browning wrote of the children’s cry.
Darwin wrote of evolving.
Some dismissed it trying to fight against that so-called religious abomination.
Others accepted it.
Some to an extreme.
“If they can’t find a way to live,” the rich man said,
“Then they deserve to die!”
Decrease the surplus population.
Right Mr. Scrooge?
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