Simple Things/ Lang Kenneth Haynes

                  Dial-tone
     It started in the awful days of the Middle Passage about a half a millennium ago. There was no problem communicating before then. Different
languages deferred to the language of the drum and the messages that Nature imparted through the flight of birds, the direction in which insects
crawled, the way the sky looked at dawn or the way the air smelled at night. But now people from different tribes with different languages were stuffed
in the hulls of ships to cross the ocean and arrive in a hell that they transformed into heaven for those other than themselves. Their sweat, blood and
lives greased the skids of prosperity that a relative few of their progeny got to savor. Most of their children and aunties and mothers and fathers and
grandmothers and grandfathers were simply fodder to feed the monster whose only interest was and is to get as fat as possible without bursting. An
amazingly greedy monster with incomprehensible elasticity or it would have come apart at the seams long ago. But maybe it is about to now. Some
call it a recession. The emperor stands naked in the middle of the marketplace except for the buffoon’s hat surpassed in ridiculousness only by his
vapid, clueless grin. I would guess that his own mother and father secretly wish their son would vanish into the mist of early morning or heat of mid-
day. No matter as long as the end result is that he evaporates. Not through violence because his father and father’s father and father’s father’s father
reaped the dubious bounty of worlds built on violence and one could not wish such an end to visit one’s own.

    Millions died during the Middle Passage. But many of us are here today. A definition of resilience is that many of us are here today. We are not
supposed to be. We were intended to be disposable and new ways were continually invented to ensure this futureless future. Staggering numbers are
in the above ground hulls of jails and prisons. Kept “in place” by steel bars instead of rotting, slimy boards of dark wood in the darker hulls of ships.
Wood drenched and oozing our blood, cries and fading but still alive memories of the sun exploding silently on horizons of blindingly brilliant colors
usually reserved for rainbows. Tribes and families and villages were separated to obliterate the possibility of communication. Because if a common
language existed to tell the horrors of their situation then surely a remedy could be formed, articulated and acted upon which would have meant that
the captors would have become captives with sentences for their demise rendered on the spot with hungry sharks serving as ravenous jurors that
sentenced them to eternal lunch. But slave ships still exist. They do not float but they still exist. They are called jails and prisons. The bars are actual
or implanted in the minds and hearts of those who are on the outside of thick prison walls adorned with razor wire.

    A growing number of people sit on the craggy, arid shores as the river of opportunity flows faster managing to wet the toes of some of the
observers. A few even muster up the courage to swim and ignore the scrapes and open wounds that result from thrashing about in shallow water. They
hope to one day to enter the main channel where the water is deep and warm with a predictable current that deposits them on a resting place they
arrive at by merely floating and not stroking frantically against currents that criss-cross each other as they swim upstream in the direction opposite
their source. Many of the people on the shore are various shades of brown. Maybe from being out in the sun for centuries with only enough water to
survive. What do we want anyway?

    We want the hook up. The connection. The phone call that will land the job, the house, admission to the university or a reasonable interest rate
on a non-predatory loan. The opportunity. The resources to support our hard work. We want the lives of our children to be richer and fuller than
anything we have ever known. We want our children to look at us admiringly, to listen to what we have to say, to respect where we have been and to
appreciate sacrifices we have made to nudge them a little deeper into the river of life and opportunity. We want to be a part of good things. We want
to be included. We want to be hooked up.

    Disruption of communication is still key in maintaining the primacy of the captors. Being poor increases the odds that your bills will be overdue.
Being poor will increase your chances of being cut off from a lot of things like other people, heat, food, bright prospects for the future, or any future,
dental care, medical care and transportation to get to any of the places you need to go. Phones are being cut off this very second because the bill
has not been paid and the choice was between heat and a dial-tone. Use a neighbor’s phone. Put your phone in your mother’s name or auntie’s
name. After all you would do the same for them. In fact, you have done the same for them at some time in some way.  It’s all part of the not-so-merry-
go-round of exclusion. Ride any horse you like. The horse of physical health, mental health, longevity, income, high school graduation rates or
incarceration rates. In an age when communication is the new gold or new cotton or relatively new commodity on the block that is transforming the
world, some of us still don’t get a dial-tone. The basic links are still missing. We are still not hooked up. The number you have called is not a working
number. The number you have called is temporarily out of service. The number you have called is disconnected.  Some say to be patient. The wait
has spanned several centuries. Is that patient enough?