Janet Kuypers
2005 poem “outsourcing the American dream”
edited 4/26/14 for reading in Linclon Square
at the Chicago 2014 Poetry Bomb
we’ve been doing pretty well over the years,
the center of attention, I know the feeling,
you’re the man with the plan, and you
act so arrogant with your past successes
but Houston, there’s a problem, you
might not want to believe it, but since
we’ve been resting on our laurels all this
time, since our fat uncles have been
sitting on the couch, burping with their
cans of beer, watching the football games
while someone else has been doing all the
cooking and cleaning for them, well,
while we’ve all been feeling cocky,
thinking about how great we are,
other countries have been training their
students in our schools, and because
we’ve been busy basking in our glory
we’ve outsourced all the work we’re too
lazy to do & we’ve trained everyone else
to beat us at our own game
(oh, I forgot to mention, we were so busy
celebrating our military and business
accomplishments that we gave up
on training ourselves to stay ahead)
well, while we’ve gotten lazy and taken a
break for a while, everyone else has started
excelling past us, so we buy our Japanese
technology and drive our German cars,
drink our French water when we’re not
drinking our French wine, and we get
as far away from the United States as we
possibly can when we want to take a vacation
well, I’m waiting for someone to realize it,
maybe having the economy fall out from
underneath our overzealous desire to
get rich quick didn’t allow us to see
but we’ve always been the giant, we were
first to fly an airplane, the first to land
on the moon, we’re in front in the world
with medicines and health care
hmmm, speaking of healthcare, most people
can’t afford it now, because we’ve researched
the Hell out of the diseases we choose
to kill ourselves with, I mean, stats say
us North Americans have the highest cancer rates
in the world, our kids are fat &?get Type 2
Diabetes, we work so many more hours but still
can’t keep ahead, and at this point we
can’t afford the fruits of our labor any longer
do we bring it upon ourselves when we
want to get rich quick by suing doctors,
forcing them to charge higher prices,
driving up the cost for everyone?
we complain that people who are on welfare
still on average own two television sets
and every teen in America now seems to
expect their own free cell phone
is it that our standard of living has risen
so dramatically that everyone now expects
everything handed to them on a silver platter?
do we ask for more without working for more?
our President wants to protect our borders
from terrorists, but he wants to give temporary
work visas to illegal Mexican immigrants,
so that other nations do our work for us
and we wonder why we’re unemployed
yeah, we can talk about how we were the
high school quarterback, & how we scored
so many touchdowns & everyone loved us
back then
while we credit card ourselves into debt
because we deserve the good things in life,
as we train other people to help us
lose in the world economy
pretty soon prices will keep going up
& we won’t be able to afford that convertible,
or the nice clothes, or for that matter,
any of the niceties
& we’ll become a people who have the
basics, but not much else, & we’ll wonder
how we’ve become a third world country
& never saw it coming
In the past, us Americans didn’t achieve our goals
because we didn’t work for them, so, beer drinking
Uncle Sam, can we get to work again
and get back on top again?
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