The following poem, as should be clear from the title, riffs on a Famous quotation from Yahweh in the Old Testament/Tanakh. It also references a fairly famous saying of Jesus, one of Tolstoy and one of Wordsworth, concluding with Herbert Spencer.
THE THIRD AND Fourth GENERATION
There is no sin,
As we have no gods to offend,
But offenses there are,
One human to another, in great regularity.
The offensiveness of familiarity
Nests above all in Families dysfunctional,
Each alike in their own different way.
No gods need destroy, nor drive mad,
Those who burden themselves
And their descendants,
Unto the third and fourth generations,
With false guilt, shame, anxiety and worse.
Rather than the elders
Being weighted with millstones
And cast into the sea,
The thrust off these crushing weights
Onto the necks of the weaker and younger
Of their own households and families.
Social Darwinism starts at home.
— Feb. 14, 2015
This post first appeared on The Philosophy Of The Socratic Gadfly, please read the originial post: here
