News Poem by Sandy Fulton

New news of a new group
Always a new group, promising faster response,
more action than the old group,
pleading for a further subdivision
of my nonexistent money and time.
If I were to donate to the new ones, and
the old ones, all the good
activists, all the good
politicians local and out-of-state,
I'd have been exiled to the street
with bed and books
and starved to death
years ago.

It's the same old, the shame old, rugged individualism,
the Western world's greatest self-delusion.
No matter how well an old group performs,
don't join it! Don't cooperate! Don't contribute our strength to it!
Succumb to pride! Be an entrepreneur!
Make our own name and fame as a startup mogul!

Why can't we realize that our existence
is keyed to cooperation? —
That competition is the creaking ancient?
As long as our prokaryote ancestors swam about
as single cells innocently swiping from each other,
eating each other,
they had little chance for better protection
or efficiency or varied aesthetic beauty.
They could not change their offspring,
nor evolve except by mutation of the cell structure.
Most mutations were accidental killers
or did nothing significant,
and the creatures, even the beautiful layered stromatolites,
were stuck in endless repetition
of themselves. We call it cloning.

It went on a long time, but life has its own way of getting out of ruts.
One of those accidents, vanishingly rare,
attached two single cells in mutual aid, and lo, it multiplied!
More cells joined, and more, forming special functions like
sensing the world with touch, sight, smell, taste, hearing, intellect, digestion,
and sex—
especially sex, the great combiner of heredity, the creator of varied life.
No longer must improvement wait for a once-in-a-billion-years accident.

Likewise in any task, when we work together we become
the cooperative key, shared by all, that unlatches
the door to success.
Presumably that's how our brains came to be,
but when will we firmly plant cooperation into our brain cells
and begin to do our best for every living creature's offspring
on our one-and-only livable world?

That's the news I want to hear!