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Fragments of Frost and Fire - Episode 14 - Genocide Of The Poor

Like Gaza, the acts of genocide are hidden beneath the manufactured reality we are presented with, but you don't need to kill with guns and bombs when you can starve people out, deny them medicine, and make their very existence illegal. The methods differ, but the systematic elimination remains the same—dressed up as urban planning, healthcare policy, and law and order.

 Genocide Of The Poor

They draw the lines like battle plans in red ink on city maps,

mark neighborhoods for "renewal" and "development,"

while sirens wail through streets that once held families

now scattered like autumn leaves before bulldozers.


A quote card with the quote "Within that country a genocide of a different kind was taking place, not against a race or religion or colour (of which there was little left within the country’s borders), but against a class of people—the poor. That was destined to be a perpetual genocide, as yesterday’s planners were doomed to become tomorrow’s planned, and the deciders, tomorrow’s decided upon." Attributed to the book Children of the Rogue by Lawrence Nault

The medicine costs more than rent,

the rent costs more than wages,

the wages buy less than silence

from those who make the rules,

and food cost prayers and tears,

no money to buy it.

 

Buses roll through midnight streets

carrying the displaced to nowhere—

one-way tickets to forgotten places

where the forgotten go to disappear.

 

Unmarked vans and unmarked people

appear and disappear in the streets,

Tallying their kills—

the ones they didn’t have to buy a bullet for,

or make an effort to relocate,

because they died on their own,

No medicine for the ill,

no doctors for the sick,

no food for the hungry,

no shelter over their head,

to shield them from death’s scythe.

 

But the wheel keeps grinding,

and yesterday's planners become tomorrow's planned,

yesterday's deciders become tomorrow's decided upon,

as the hungry machine demands fresh fuel.

 

The middle class discovers

their bootstraps have been cut,

their savings evaporated

in the same heat that consumed the others.

 

Now they stand in the same lines,

hold the same cardboard signs,

learn the same bitter lessons:

that the bottom has many floors.

 

The wheel keeps grinding,

grinding down,

grinding through

every layer of society

until only the grinders remain,

feeding each other

to their own machine.

 

And still it turns,

this engine of elimination,

creating what it destroys,

destroying what it creates,

an ouroboros of inequality

eating its own tail

in an endless feast

of systematic starvation.

 

The last ones left

will draw new lines,

mark new maps,

find new others

to feed the grinding wheel

that grinds forever

in the heart

of empire.

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