As I sit and reflect upon the end of one year and look forward to the next, a passage from Walt Whitman comes to mind that I am taking the liberty of quoting herein.
I Sit and Look Out (Walt Whitman - Leaves of Grass)
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world,
and upon all the oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish
with themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children,
dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the
treacherous seducer of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love
attempted to be hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see
martyrs and prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors
casting lots who shall be kill'd to preserve the
lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by
arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and
upon negroes, and the like,
All these - all the meanness and agony without end I
See, hear, and am silent.
How little has changed in the 150 years since
this was initially published.
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