Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Bye Bye Zeroes: The Decade of Greed and Gloom

It’s been a while since I’ve been here. Felt a twinge of guilt because I haven’t followed the marketing mantra of consistent posts. Well I’m not a low winter light person in spite of the many, somewhat successful efforts of dealing with the winter blues. The best involved entrainment through a sound /light machine (www.mindalive.com).

In the months ahead I’m planning to continue my focus on the job world, addressing the plight of the employed and unemployed, offering success strategies, and questioning socio-political strategies that cater to the few and leave the many out in the cold. Also, since I have the beginning of a life, career, and business coaching endeavor in place I will be addressing that space as well. I haven’t forgot IT and will soon offer some perspective of year 2 (really 3) of the recession and so called “jobless recovery.”

Here, to say goodbye to the last decade, I will offer a short poem that epitomizes the final, and maybe worst, year in one the worst decades in American History; perhaps only eclipsed by the 1930’s and the decade of the US civil war, the 1860’s.

Moreover, in IT, and elsewhere, we saw many US employers sell out their employees, and many themselves, in an unparalleled wave of job expatriation that is politely called outsourcing, a profoundly unpatriotic practice that would have led to “tarring and feathering” of these mercenaries when there was still that somewhat hokey, but very humane, American mindset of “One for All and All for One”.

Also it was a decade where greed ran rampant, terror was sometimes used as a tool by government suppress the free expression and thought of the populace (sound familiar?), and torture was justified by some of the last regime as standard operating procedure. The damage caused by these factors will take many years, and even decades, to ameliorate at home. The only silver lining lately is that our standing in the world has improved somewhat by the reaching out of the new Administration.

Here is the poem called “Meltdown Moon.” I am also planning a little ditty in honor of a decade of profound discontent called “Bye Bye Zeroes,” but that, as they occasionally say in the web world, is “under construction.”

Meltdown Moon

In our hour of gleaming gloom
Of sickly shadows strangling
A meltdown moon.
Lost light of dimming dreams
Shattered and scattered in a
Fading beam
Floating pyres flicker then flee to
Find roses rotted, reflected in a
Plastic sea

Wall Street wolves slyly smile
Luring lambs and lizards to leech
Their Pile
Right brain boosters chant free at last
As malled in masses mourn their
Imagined past
An eerie echo of phantoms squeal
Escaping eras of wealth, power
And sex appeal

Michael Jay Sullivan