Forty Thousand Feet
From forty thousand feet, the feuds
Shrink to a shimmer on the plain;
What looked like armies of the wise
Is one long river in the rain.
A man below, at his black mic,
Declares the world a hall of fools;
He says their minds can’t be repaired,
And he, of course, is not the rule.
He warms to it: the dumb, he says,
Can’t see the borders of their dark.
A tidy science, with one flaw —
It never checked him for the mark.
The blindness he describes so well
Is not a gift he got to skip;
From up here, every prophet’s fist
Looks like a hand that lost its grip.
And some are born with narrower light
They never got to choose;
They love, they grieve, they hold the door —
I will not laugh at what they lose.
From here, the clever and the slow
Are one bright blur of want and need;
Both fall in love, both fear the dark,
Both bleed when someone makes them bleed.
I’ve been the fool in someone’s feed,
Declaring what the crowd can’t see;
The one mind I have keys to still
Locks half its rooms away from me.
Reason is not a hammer, friend;
It’s a lamp you carry for your feet.
You cannot shine it through a skull,
But you can light your own dark street.
So let the loud man keep his niche;
Contempt sells tickets by the pound.
I’d rather ask what I got wrong
Than win the whole thing on the ground.
We land. The dots are people now,
With names, with debts, with someone who waits.
The mind I’m sent here to repair
Boarded with me — and it’s late

…

DCG

We are surrounded by idiots, outnumbered by fools, and the number grows greater every single day, because stupidity is immune to reason. Hear me again: stupidity is immune to reason. You can’t give them information to change them. You can’t give them data to fix them. Stupidity doesn’t accept that. And here’s the worst part. The Dunning-Kruger effect goes into play, because Dunning-Kruger says they’re so stupid they cannot recognize their own incompetence.

— attribution unverified