Happiness Was

Enjoying all the good times spent driving too far back home after working way too late once again

Financing all manner of gadgets, gaudy renovations and re-decorating with unearned home equity

Sitting mesmerized year after year before the empty spectacle of the corporate sports altar

Awaking over and over again in the dark night to relive some imagined office slight

Looking forward so long to all those wondrous vacations we can’t even remember now

Being freed from our grandfather’s thrifty guilt by modern finance go-go negative savings rates

Scarfing down donuts to quell that anxiety which gnawed just as if it were real hunger

Steadily increasing our disposable income thru the miracle of multiple maxed out credit cards

Gunning a loudly-modified diesel exhaust while passing an old Japanese economy car

Dreaming, just like your little friends, that things would never really change that much

Leaving the kids to cellophane-wrapped snacks and their latest video games

Getting paid for doing nothing and saving big on Chinese slave labor down at the Wal*Mart

Tossing out any and all kinds of chemical rubbish and never even thinking of it again

Swallowing whole their expensive lies about the terrible enemies surrounding us

Laughing hard with everybody else about the need for even moderate exercise

Gleefully marginalizing the wackos and scientists, the squishy liberals and those silly tree huggers

Smirking at the weaklings as they scrimped and saved, recycled and economized

Blowing off boring nutrition and eating for the salty or sweet taste of fiber-free, fatty fast foods

Resting quite assured that god watches over and blesses only us, every single day

Visiting our drugged elders in the warehouse whose glossy brochures met all of their senior needs

Driving enraged and alone in a junk Detroit barge built to carry 8 fully-grown & obese adults

Sucking down expensive, high-calorie lattes like clockwork, every day at 10

Labeling recycling as an unnecessary and dubious virtue, simply of no real consequence

Projecting arrogance and pride through our loudly exceptionist and totally ethnocentric ignorance

Coddling our precious children, each quite exceptional & prize-winning in its own very special way

Demanding at every political foto-op that god should bless this land and our traditional excesses

Extinguishing exotic animals for firewood, marginal crops and other short-term, so-called progress

Condemning religious fanatics after prayerful talks with our own personal saviors

Treating our livestock like raw materials and manufacturing our food crops like factory goods

Acting as if consumer spending could actually be the driving force behind any sustainable economy

Expecting to continue this orgy of mindless consumption somewhere off in our fairytale heaven

Flattening forests and turning rivers into sewage pipes and our lakes into cesspools

Condemning all environmental and safety measures as too costly in terms of jobs and money

Cynically labeling research as junk science and fuzzy math and stalling for more study

Mocking their foolish efforts at saving tiny mice, foolish desert fish, stupid frogs and such

Plunging blindly on with the righteous moral authority granted to us by our one true savior