Who’s Naïve?
Marge Piercy

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Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005) and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006).

ESSAYS ON:

• » africa
• » asia
• » empire & the new imperialism
• » europe
• » feminism/women
• » food & hunger
• » globalization
• » iraq & u.s. imperialism
• » labor/working-class
• » latin america & caribbean
• » media/communications
• » the war on terrorism & the new police state
• » u.s. politics/economy
• » social/political theory

A young woman said to me
you guys in the sixties were so
naïve. How could you ever believe
there would be a revolution?

Oh, child of the oughts, did you
ever believe Wall Street would
turn out to be a sham, stocks
made of piffle and hype?

Did you ever believe General
Motors would come to tax
payers cup in hand begging
not to go out of business?

Did you ever believe we would
go to war on a lie? That one
president could fuck up every
thing standing in just eight years?

That we would elect an African
American president? That in some
states, lesbians and gays could marry?
That greed might go out of style?

What I’ve learned on my hard
scrabble way is that nothing remains
but trouble and love and opportunity
we can make to change what needs it.

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