The People Who Think They’re Right
It all started in my hometown. More like my home city, South Minneapolis, home to great communities and ridiculed for being a hotbed of movements deemed as domestic terrorist activities by the people who are the true domestic threats. They want to destroy the common man, woman, and child just so they can bathe in vice and luxury until one day they perish with the rest of us.
Plagues of both types have swept the land called the “Home of the Free, Land of the Brave.” Plagues of the body and mind. Infections caused a disappearance of millions, leaving the rest of the lot traumatized with fear, anger, and death. The mind was left to its own devices; the echo chamber in the ground was dug deeper. The richer became richer and promised false realities that snatched the common person’s mind, expecting that they too could achieve great glory by “working harder and sacrificing virtues.” The poor were dragged along in the mud left by the Wells Fargo wagon and a band of horses, long lost into the mountains never to see the light of day. They lay in bunkers and wait for the supersonics to fly overhead and drop on a city just like my own.
Hang on to your bootstraps, say the people who think they’re right. What’s left of the long forgotten hang on by threads woven by their ancestors. A scissors cuts the strands and throws them away into trash cans filled with black tar. The tar came from the ground, pulled and refined to a trinket, toy, product—something that will eventually one day end in the ground again with a piece of the human race attached to it.
Ouch, my neck hurts. Murder in broad daylight by the city’s “finest” who swore an oath to protect and serve. The city is now in flames, my home city I love so dearly. Who can blame them? Frustration and lack of hope must be released or the world will truly end. The people who think they’re right blame and speak obscenities. “Oh damn them, they have disrupted the natural order of things,” they say. Next, after speaking their truth that has the weight of a miniature Baby Ruth, they put on belts, suspenders, and bootstrap extenders that wrap around their thumbs and use their thumb and pointer finger to fill in an oval bubble with black tar, only to be duped and lied to. They watch still, believing and holding onto their truth—the truth that they think is right.
The people who think they are right sit on a throne of blood and sin. They cover the throne with a holy blanket gifted to them by the Basilica cardinal and flex it over the airwaves, saying that the throne they sit on is divine and granted by a higher power for a higher purpose only they understand. They say, “Trust me and the truth I present and represent. Don’t you worry—close your eyes, ears, and mouth and follow blindly into my nirvana.”
The population of what’s left are ridiculed and attacked from the outside in. Even the brothers and sisters who once knew what they were fighting for forget and turn on one another. The people who think they’re right now sit back and watch the show of self-destruction. They pull their bootstraps taut and pluck a note on it, singing the anthem of the new truth.
Power and authority is then granted by man on a throne of sin and blood. He says, “Go, under my divine protection. Go, crusade the land and spread your seed, plant it and let it grow. You are all my farmers, destined to reap what you sow.” Sharp scythes cut down the innocent, they are bundled up and shipped out.
Everyone hide, look over your shoulder, only go out at night to disappear into the shadows. What’s left finally settle that they won’t come for them, but they soon find out they are sorely mistaken. All of what’s left will be all of what was.
The people who think they’re right will have their confidence flourish into cactus flowers. The cactus will see other cacti’s beauty while the outside creature stays away because of its thorns.
Where is the hope to continue? The straws once stuck in the throats and noses of ocean turtles now stuck in the hearts of what’s left. New restaurant chains are erected in once peaceful neighborhoods, serving medium-well, freshly ground hope.
It all started in my hometown, my home city. Terror and confusion, the world looking in from the outside wondering what will come of them.
—1/11/2026