Two (not so gentle) Shoves Toward Action

Are you unaware that vast numbers of your fellow men suffer or perish from need of the things that you have to excess, and that you require the explicit and unanimous consent of the whole human race for you to appropriate from the common subsistence anything besides that required for your own?

-Jean-Jacques Rousseau

TV, computers, and the Internet
Democratize our sins, so that
The smallest child may have a dirty mind,
And this is progress for our kind,
Enriching those who most deserve to be
Enriched, leaving in poverty
The ones who're most deserving to be poor.
This way our art and literature
Serve our God-given freedom to express
Ourselves however we think best
And be as uninhibited as hogs,
Our electronic catalogs
Conveying all our everlasting hopes
While we glide down the frozen slopes
Of the statistical analysis
And the opinion poll.

Let this
Be a sign unto us: the plug, once plugged,
Cannot forever be unplugged.
When shocked by our electrifying diet
Of filth, inanity, and riot,
Official violence and family quarrels,
We pray to government to save our morals.

-Wendell Berry, "The air of the free"