Spring Editorial

As the chill of winter gives way to the warming storms of spring, the daily news becomes a wrenching gut-punch replete with the increasing raids on immigrant refugees, the tearing of children from parents and the building of concentration camps. The blatant criminality and corruption of Trump's filthy gang of grifters is only surpassed by their outrageous arrogance and the libelous ugliness of their hate-filled lies.

What is missed by many in our largely uninformed amnesiac empire is that the migrants -- largely indigenous Americans -- are refugees of our own heinous support, arming and backing of brutal death-squad regimes, military coups, and forced austerities; the maquiladora reality of enforced destitution.

The horrific poverty and brutal oppression we have forced on poor countries around the world for the benefit of corporations is now increasingly being applied in our own poor and urban communities as the vultures of capitalism come home to roost.

The attacks on refugees are being called a "Zero Tolerance" policy. As the poems in this collection illustrate, we too have zero tolerance. We cannot and will not tolerate systemic bigotry, the brutal theft of our rights and resources, the nightmare theft of children, the erasure of public protections, the poisoning of our communities and the theft of a livable future.

The poets in this collection describe the moral and structural entropy that grips our country. They write of lives wasted, in stupid, too often degrading and health-killing jobs. Of bosses trying to cheat us. Of elusive and failing health care. The hard reality of environmental destruction, alienation and homelessness.

These poems speak of the insanity of guns, misplaced anger and rampant violence by police and by the deranged which increasingly plague our daily existence. They speak of the diseased violence of Empire we export globally. Most important is that the poems -- that these working class poets write -- reflect a knowledge of history, the class consciousness of community and a vision of angry hope. Not the delusional hope that cripples, but the militant love that demands sanity, justice and a better world.

Sometimes we have to wonder what difference writing a poem makes amid the ongoing monstrosity. We have to believe that while words are insufficient, the example of sanity, solidarity and of a better vision passed along from mouth to ear, from hand to hand and by our actions, touches souls, awakening the better selves buried beneath the toxic garbage of bourgeois commercial militarized culture. That it can undermine the fascist ecocidal juggernaut. We believe in the transformative power of culture; that working class culture with its vision of the common good, the solidarity of love that excludes no one, which rejects the egotism of abusive exploitation, can undermine this rotten system by showing a way forward and creating a future we can live in.