When our parents and teachers warned,
That we shouldn’t expect the world to be fair,
I used to imagine some secret Arbiter,
Rushing to-and-fro to ensure imbalance,
Casting infertile shadows over the valleys of the mischosen,
Leveling out the playing field for the lucky ones on the Other side,
Ensuring no certainty in our attempts to predict the future;
The Dark face of Fate.
Of course there never was any arbiter,
Except through the natural,
Which is to say random,
Boons and banes of geography.
No,
The warnings were always an admission,
Which I couldn’t hear until I was old enough to call myself an adult,
That we shouldn’t expect fairness because we shouldn’t want it,
Since there aren’t any winners without losers.
So they made another Bogeyman,
To translate the harsh truths of life,
Into axioms fit for a child;
“That’s just the way the world is”.
As if time had disappeared,
Erasing the past versions of “The World”,
Which so conveniently contradict the present.
I ‘m not angry with them though,
These equity deniers who raised me:
It isn’t their fault they were born into a world so large,
Far away and forgettable.
But the world shrank,
Too quickly for the elders to adapt,
But slow enough to witness the changes of a frightening magnitude:
Their world being wiped away.
They’re still stuck using antiquated calculus,
To measure up their lives and self-worth,
With variables in constant flux,
Making prediction and calculation impossible,
Constantly countered by the world they’ve become lost in.
It has become our duty,
As Children of the Smaller World,
To ease the worried minds of those before us,
Reminding them that the world will always,
Forever and has-been,
Be what we make it and,
To be fair,
That’s just the way the world is.