"The Lord is Your Shepherd, You Shall Not Want. Stop, Enjoy"

by Jeph Johnson (inspired by an anonymous meme and a line from an even less important book)


You are not yet hungry. You need not want.

 

Stop, enjoy.

 

But when we were hungry, you fed us lies and stole away our food benefits.

 

When we were thirsty, you gave us overflowing founts of poisoned water.

 

When we were sick, you canceled our health insurance and sequestered the focus of our doctors to vanity.

 

When we were in prison, you kept us enslaved without hope of rehabilitation, to for-profit corporate greed.

 

When we were strangers with a different color of skin you laughed at our expense, deported us or simply shot us when we protested your intolerance.

 

When we were lonely you took away our social programs, furthering your agenda of isolation.

 

Not all of us want to live in a tower locked away from the rest of the world.

 

But you...

Stop, enjoy.

 

From our elders you took away meals, medicine and social security.

 

From our workers, you took away legal protections, bargaining rights and refused to offer living wages.

 

When we went forth and multiplied, you took away funding for educating our future.

 

Stop, enjoy.

 

When we were bored you entertained us with strategically manipulative propaganda disguised as reality.

 

We asked for diversity, you promoted intolerance.

 

We hoped for caring, you encouraged isolationism.

 

We begged for equity, you squandered our resources on corporate and military excess.

 

We just wanted to breath, so you removed the filters from the smokestacks and coughed out more smog.

 

Those of us with physical and developmental challenges you mocked and ridiculed as fat and retarded.

 

While those of us with mental illness wander the streets cursing the world, building makeshift beds with cardboard boxes, wrapping our fragile bodies in shrouds of bubble wrap in downtown doorways.

 

Those who trample are responsible for the downtrodden.

Your health and wealth is at our ill expense.

 

Stop, enjoy.

 

When we were naked, you raped us, then blamed us because we were provocatively undressed.

 

Victimized, rather than offering refuge, we became your refuse; no shelter or hope for protection.

 

"Go back to him,"
you promised,
"He'll change."

 

After you systematically destroy us individually using each of these calculated methods, no beauty will be left in the world.

 

Stop, enjoy.

 

When gluttons engorge on an entire generation without hope of regeneration, those who you consume perish and only excrement remains.

 

Are you hungry yet?

Stop, enjoy.

Author's Notes/Comments: 

2017 

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