FASTER BIGGER BETTER Poem 33 in STARS IN OUR SOULS

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Everything faster, everything bigger, nothing necessarily better.

That has become the 'poisoned-chalice' mantra of our modern world. This poem, which is number 33 in Richard Dell's STARS IN OUR SOULS, is not just a description of where we are now. It is also a warning. The corona virus pandemic is our chance to emerge from the other side of the pandemic and readjust our lives and thereby our world. But will we?

Between the wars, when hyperinflation wracked Germany, the Berlin government was congratulated on its ability to speedily print higher and higher denominations of banknotes. To some extent they were forced into this. No-one chose for there to be such a catastrophic devaluation of the currency. But there was certainly nothing new in praise being heaped on people or organisations that could fashion such extreme achievements. And there is certainly nothing wrong in having ambitions to achieve new ‘heights’ and in actually achieving those new heights. But that being said, we do need to take stock of some of our ambitions and endeavours. It is laudable to run faster without the aid of performance enhancing drugs; laudable too to create a plane that can fly faster and higher than any other; or for that matter a car or train that can travel faster than any other. But what of our everyday lives? Is it really sensible to create trains that go fast, only to create new trains that go faster and so on? Do we need to motor along a highway at seventy, eighty or a hundred miles an hour, when it is probably safer and more relaxing and more environmentally appropriate to travel at some slower speed? Is an increasingly hectic world a boon for humanity? Is a noisier world to our advantage? Speeds and size and noise seem to dominate our national and world agendas. We have certainly improved when it comes to safety, but there seems to be very little room these days for matters such as beauty or elegance. Where are we in this brave new world we are creating?

In Richard Dell’s ‘STARS IN OUR SOULS’, poem 33 addresses this very point:




33
FASTER, BIGGER, BETTER
Everything faster, everything bigger; nothing necessarily better.

Everything to be loud.
Everything to be allowed.
Everything to be fast.
Everything to avoid being last.
Everything beyond compare.
Everything beyond repair.
Noise upon noise.
Hype upon hype.
This better than that.
That better than this.
Me better than you.
Us better than them.

You race me.
I’ll race you.
We’ll race each other,
We’ll race the other.
The race to be bigger.
The race to be faster.
The race to be louder.
The race to be zanier.
The race to be cleverer,
The race to be racier.

The race against time:

***
Before time runs out.
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