Cultural and financial capital
of the rapidly narrowing world,
your streets formerly designed
for the era of horse and carriage,
now teem with experience seekers
avidly recording on digital cameras
everything they see, however trivial.
Due to the media’s constant exposure
of crime, drugs, poverty, discourtesy,
visitors are frequently amazed
at the kindness of New Yorkers,
who were that way before 9/11,
but now are more appreciative
of the day-to-day niceties
that bind us together in troubled times.
Our tolerance is unpublicized,
despite the patience we maintain
when protestors abuse our right
to host democratic events
in relative peace and tranquility,
simply because they disagree with us.
They are not patriots versus loyalists,
southerners versus northerners,
merely transient summer soldiers,
fervent for disruption,
offering no better alternative,
but we will survive their brief presence
and clean up after them.

Political inclinations
that generally conflict
sometimes become more moderate
when youthful passions are tempered.
There are general exceptions,
primarily senility,
which tends to make one querulous
and impatient of another.
Then there is loss of appetite,
when the struggle becomes boring
and makes it hard to remember
what the effort is all about.
Fatigue is a tranquilizer
that erodes the will for combat,
drains one of the perseverance
that provided satisfaction.
The worst condition of old age,
is when one is too numb to care
what happens to the world at large,
because it no longer matters.
Loss of transmission of knowledge
from one generation to the next
causes dumbing down of our country
and threatens the future of youth,
who may no longer be smart enough
to insure future survival.

© 2008 Gary Beck

Gold rush race,
use any means, else too late.
Greedy yellow metal dreams
ebb away in tarnished streams,
flowered hills, twinkling rills.
Hunger, scurvy, gunshot
ends the claim
to golden fame.