Yes, things can be statistically demonstrated to be moving in a certain direction, and the obvious assumption is that an object in motion will remain in motion unless stopped. In this manner, all your worst expectations can be proven to be true, and you won't even need to use a pocket calculator.

Anything bad is evidence of everything bad.

The statistics will whisper to you any lie you want, your most perverse nightmares, in the rustling of newspaper leaves.

The fact that we have access to this information is enough to make me smile. Things could be, and won't be, worse.

Without any hope for a better future, there is no hope for a better future. And so hope is a great thing to do. Not the only thing, maybe not the most important thing, but a frail thread of hope is a pencil sketch that can someday be marked up in black ink, a wisp of smoke describing a future architecture. Hope can lead to expectations, even plans. That thread could point the way. Will the world get any better if nobody really expects it to?

We are all suffering from a refusal to remember the future. We've blocked the whole thing out of our minds.

The system will break down unless you expect the worst of it. A cynical outlook is neither a rebellion against the false smile of consumerism nor a bold ability to face facts squarely, it is an implanted emotion, a manufactured consent. You have given the apparatus permission to continue to strangle the world. Because the apparatus has produced a briefcase and withdrawn from it a few basic charts demonstrating the spread of poverty and environmental devastation. It shows you a photo of a war orphan, you nod, you write an angry poem, it nods. You and the apparatus have a thing going.

And you can have the last laugh because you won't be disappointed, not having risked hoping. You told me so. Me, I'm just going to surround myself with the cozy cocoon of a steady income and fester within like a rotting butterfly. This world holds its endangered species hostage, murdering them one by one just to hurt me personally.

When the chance comes to build a better world, will you be ready? Will you notice? Or will you see the breakdown of the old order as another problem with the old order?

It's not a butterfly, it's a dead caterpillar.

It's not a pregnancy, it's an illness.

It's the end of the millennium, not the beginning.

The bee rapes the flower.

The muse of anger just got fired.

Muse wanted.

Revisionist fortune teller.

"Don't bring me down." - Lennon/McCartney