Overview
American Bastards, a Poem
What are you trying to tell me, because my ears and my eyes confuse what logic should prove?
Am I a product of genetics, or a byproduct of my environment?
Unified in national pride, yet dividend along racial lines, sexuality segments further what academic pursuits already split from the whole. Call me HomoSomethingOrOther.
I am a byproduct of genetics and rearing. A mongrelized manifestation of a tragedy, a dream, and an unapologetic love of self that prioritizes biological urges above biological obligations. Must I commit to ending the genetic line here to prevent further bastardization of the collective whole? Or is the goal to do the opposite, thereby creating a new species unbound by the previous communal and genetic forces that created our ancestral lineage?
Where does morality fall when the group considers my kind to be a danger or discredit to the whole?
When family, religion, and society say assimilate, but the heart says persevere, the path taken is inherently moral because it takes the rejection of the whole and uses it to fuel the evolution of the new. Whether that species is a continuation of the whole or a new branch is a matter of semantics, for biology and change spawned the diversity of life that we know to be the sum of all known life, and no record can be produced which proves or disproves the argument that the whole portfolio of biological life was not bastardized to start.
Maybe my new species was spawned to replace the old, but if that were true then am I Adam, Eve, or Lucifer?
Is the distinction even relevant if all parts are necessary to comprise the whole? Furthermore, if all parts are required, then why must we name each part individually? Why rank what logic says cannot be ranked due to a lack of empirical evidence?
To evade the truth? That we are all bastardized, mongrelized, rejected, accepted, and ignored because we evolved, and broke away, and joined together so much that we lost sight of our collective propensity to be who we are despite who we were to start; byproducts of byproducts that claim to be pure and untainted.
All Americans are Bastards, I just accept it.
Author – Shaun L Hardrick
