$1.7 Trillion

This is a repost from my Cary Academy blog;

During US Government Politics & Political Theory, we watched a West Wing episode from the first season, Six Meetings Before Lunch.  (Supposedly, that title is a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, where the White Queen says to Alice, “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”)  We finished in Chapter 3, entitled $1.7 Trillion, about slavery reparations, and it reminded me of a poem that I had written almost forty years ago:

fellow honky
  A big jump we got
    lived two and three centuries dragging chains
    they never lost
    forty acres and two ass
    they never got
    no landrush lot
  Big jump we got
  Ten decades and more it’s built up
    prosperity for our children
    Inherent right? Right.
    we’ve inherited gift and debt
brother ofay
  Pretty soon
  we have to pay.
                                 –1972