.
Enlightened Minds
Most live life unsure and frightened,
bearing burdens they want lightened.
Waking, working, living, dying.
Wondering why they keep on trying.
Until thoughts that sound so heightened
come from minds that seem enlightened,
and provide an explanation
for our desperate situation.
What they teach sounds so appealing,
each word spoken with such feeling,
breeding in us the awareness—
all that matters is unfairness.
Each of these enlightened teachers,
teach that our external features
are the core of all existence
and the cause of life’s resistance.
We’re reduced to race and gender,
either victim or offender.
Once we’re sorted, we’re not able
to remove or change our label.
With these notions now created,
and their poison permeated,
we just splinter into factions
and then catalog infractions.
Hate, when sown in these conditions
soon removes all inhibitions.
Tiny triggers lead to fighting
which prevent us from uniting.
So, be shy and even frightened,
of those claiming they’re enlightened.
They are found in every college,
where they teach their so-called knowledge.
There, enlightened moralizers
walk with Hamas sympathizers
calling for extermination
of the tiny Jewish nation.
We’ll end this unholy terror
when we see God’s image-bearer
in each person He created,
even in those we once hated.
.
.
Warren Bonham is a private equity investor who lives in Southlake, Texas.
Great poem, Warren, and one that needs to be shared everywhere in this newly acidic environment. You not only hit the nail on the head, you buried it!
I’m glad I hit the nail and not my thumb with this one! Thanks
“Once we’re sorted, we’re not able, to remove or change our label”. This line particularly caught my eye and I think it true of many people who are unable to apologize and see another side. Great poem, well-spoken message and perfect rhythm and rhyme. Thank you Warren.
I’ve done my share of sorting and labeling in the past but I try hard not to do so anymore. Apologizing more often is my next project.
I like the catchy rhymes, the observations of the prevailing culture, and I’m particularly fond of the last verse which turns the focus on the solution to all the problems. Good job!
Thanks for the comments! If we can find a way to un-cancel God on college campuses, we could make some real headway.
I most like the conclusion, the uncomfortable conclusion– right when we readers are really fed up with all that’s going on, the reminder that these lost, violent souls are also made in God’s image.
Sadly, everyone gets caught up in this sorting/labeling frenzy to a degree. It seems to be most rampant on college campuses but the solution must be universally applied for it to be effective.
Excellent, Warren. Those who view themselves as most enlightened are often the most ignorant.
You paraphrased a quote from Bertrand Russell which kickstarted this poem for me.
“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
He was also skeptical about education, as shown in his quote below.
“We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought.”
Russell would have looked with scorn at the enlightened minds leading us today (although, being an agnostic, he would have found a very different solution).
A fantastic poem, Warren, which presents the psychology of a type — that vaguely dissatisfied student who has no spiritual or moral center and is, therefore, ripe for manipulation. Such students are easily influenced, then brainwashed into black-and-white thinking and hatred. Your matter-of-fact tone is more horrifying than if you filled the poem with blood and hellfire. Those you describe remind me of Hannah Arendet’s phrase “the banality of evil.”
That phrase by Arendet is spot on. Thanks for introducing me to her. I just took a cursory glance and she is someone we should all be taught about but I suspect that her views may not be well received today.
Warren, I live among those “enlightened minds,” even though I’ve been spared much contact with them lately, staying at home a lot. I’ve not seen a lot of support for Hamas among students here at Pitt (University of Pittsburgh). I have little connection with them, but it would likely be reported. As for faculty, I had not had any illusions before the bloody shabbat, knowing how progressive they were, but indifference was still surprising to me. And that indifference is not indiscriminate: after the Paris terrorist attacks on November 13, 2015, the chancellor an impressive show of support for the French people, complete with the French flag colors on the Cathedral of Learning. Nothing of the kind for Israel, not even after I sent my request to the entire university leadership. Just a bureaucratic write-off in response and then, three days after, a senseless announcement naming neither the victims for the perpetrators. That is not a lip service. History has taught us nothing; it never does. Perhaps poetry like yours will. Thank you for it.
Living on the front lines like you do is more than I can imagine. It’s a lot easier for me since I’m not living in a foxhole. We’re lucky to have people like you but I wish we had more of them.
Michael, I also teach, and I think there is one thing that has to be understood. Administrators in academia are TERRIFIED of student reactions, faculty reactions, and staff reactions. Expressing any kind of genuine sympathy for Israel after October 7 would have caused a backlash so severe and nasty at all levels of the school that there would be internal consequences, like resolutions of “no confidence,” or calls for resignation, or noisy and violent demonstrations.
Nearly all of academia is now a hotbed of anti-semitism disguising itself as anti-Zionism or anti-colonialism. This was an inevitable result of the dominance of multiculturalism, Critical Race Theory, DEI mandates, and the generalized left-wing reflexes of most college faculty. When you celebrate something and subsidize it, you get more of it. And when all new hiring is done with a checklist of such concerns, the deal is done.
Thank you, Warren. Joseph, a great Russian writer, Mikhail Bulgakov, of The Master and Margarita fame, says in that novel, from the mouth of Pontius Pilate, that cowardice is the most terrible vice. Moreover, terrified as those academic administrators may be may be, they should be scared much more by becoming the inheritors of the infamy of German professors, who in their overwhelming majority accepted and promoted Nazism. But, of course, it is the heritage of Marxism that dominates and metastasizes in all its current permutations in academia that you mention – and Marxism and its zero-sum oppressors-oppressed game has never been subject of true condemnation among the progressives. In fact, it is their main tool. Here is my brief take on that, from two years ago: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/marxian-misnomers-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-academia/. Thank you again.
You said it so well. The Jew-haters are indeed uninhibited, and sadly all too often unchecked. I fear that your last verse will not come true any time soon, either in your country or mine (Britain.)
I’m not sure it would make a difference anyway. After all, Satan sees God’s image in every human being.
I agree that seeing an image-bearer is necessary but not sufficient. The devil is very crafty, resourceful and relentless.
Warren, your poem is a sad but realistic picture of most “higher” education. But it reminded me of how Thomas Aquinas College teaches about the Enlightenment. Aquinas is a Great Books school and the students read the bad as well as the good. When they are juniors, they read Immanuel Kant, who tried to say what enlightenment is. During the days of reading and discussing Kant, everyone else at the college is particularly kind to juniors, to try to make up for the undigested “enlightenment” they have to sample. And they get through it, thereby learning what to think of many teachers at other colleges. Try this wordless video for a bright picture of how to un-cancel God on campus.
https://www.thomasaquinas.edu/video-seek-first
That’s a great model for all colleges and probably close to what they all used to look like when we were taught how to think rather than what to think.
Warren, this poem of wisdom highlights all the pitfalls of listening to the divisive “experts” on all the ills our planet faces… those who gain our sympathies in order to separate us and pit us against each other. The minute we realize that it’s these very people who are claiming to care that care the least is the minute this crumbling sphere has the potential to heal. As time goes on, I get the ever-increasing feeling that isn’t going to happen… any time soon. But it’s poems like this that may well speed the process. Warren, thank you!
Unfortunately, I share your pessimism but hope is not yet completely lost.
You could have titled this poem “The Popinjays”. It’s not often that I get to read a poem written in convincing trochaic meter, and I am happy to have done so.