"With advice from more than 200 policy experts, Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to answer what has emerged as a central question of her early presidential campaign strategy: how to address the anger about income inequality without overly vilifying the wealthy." The New York Times, February 8, 2015
In the twenty-first century we choose to be blind
To what Juvenal glimpsed in the first:
"Is it just simple madness to lose a hundred thousand,
And then refuse a shirt to a shivering slave?"
It was so in Rome then as it is in America today,
But the eyes of two-hundred policy experts are wide shut
To where the madness led then and is leading now:
"Most of mankind is now at sea! Wherever the hope
Of profit leads, a fleet will follow."
Madness, Juvenal understood, comes in different guises,
The ships following one sink as do those following another.
He knew what our leaders dismiss; but it takes no
Sherlock to know that in this case
two-hundred heads are not better than one.
George Salamon taught German at several colleges, served as staff reporter for the St. Louis Business Journal and Senior Editor of Defense Systems Review. He contributes regularly to the Gateway Journalism Review, Jewish Currents and The New Verse News from St. Louis, MO.