No Hiding Place

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

“Hide nothing, for time which sees all and hears all, exposes all.” – Sophocles.

“Rhetoric, it seems, is a producer for persuasion of belief, not for instruction in the matter of right and wrong.” - Plato

“On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, ‘is it safe?’ Expedience asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Then Vanity come along and asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But Conscience asks the question, ‘Is it right?’”  -Martin Luther King Jr.

“Eloquence is the nature of art and cannot be learned in schools, but rhetoric is the creature of art which he who feels least will most excel in.” – Charles Caleb Colton

Now, forgiveness never comes easy for any of us. But if a greater part of the civilized world will never forgive Vladimir Putin for authorising the Russian invasion of Ukraine, political expediency alone will ensure an enduring pragmatism, whatever rhetoric it delivers to its peoples.

Much the same, I daresay, can be said of human nature as it affects all our lives on a daily basis.

NO HIDING PLACE

No safe place to hide away,
give us time and space enough to see
our way through
the damn maze of mixed feelings,
under the digital
watch of a world far less inclined
to forgive than to live
and let live, no matter what’s true or fake,
only make or break

We think the very deceptions
we weave will see us easily and safely
through the maze,
our being architects of its every bend,
so unlikely to fall foul
of such untruths and half-truths
required to negotiate
every twist and turn, emerge a clear winner
in the politics of power

Power, though, over others,
for all its fine trappings, may yet prove
as vulnerable
to the very worst flaws in human nature
exploited on its way
with more than a little help from friends
of like minds,
convinced, by now they could do even better
than their mentor

Every heart has its heroes,
deliverers from such evils as the world
creates or promotes;
for every such hero, though, its antonyms
giving expression
to an innate, ever-nagging vanity,
feeding on an inability
to see a potential in humanity to resist persuasion
under coercion...

Our enemies, though primed
in the art of faux reason and persuasion
risk exposure,
by majority life and art forces deploring
any act that’s at best,
only human, at worst abandoning
the truer landscape
of any personal space where a free mind-body-spirit
defies corrosion of it

Copyright R. N. Taber 2022