Money and Law

Resources and enforcement.
Look around your little world.
Side-eye ideologies.

Let religious faiths remain
Like teams of shirts vs. skins,
Ditto teams of skins, flags, tongues.

Anything common under
Distinct systems of order,
Capital distribution,

Degrees of equality,
Trust, free exchange, voting rights,
Border patrols, safety nets?

Resources move among you,
And patterns of enforcement,
And methods of enforcement.

Look past your haunted species
And what appears different?
Resources still move around

Get sequestered, fought over,
Consumed, traded, piled, shared,
But where is the enforcement?

Inside the ant colonies,
Inside the bee hives—maybe
Stripling wolf cubs get their cuffs.

But find us another form
Of living with enforcement
So madly variable,

One hive whose rules keep shifting,
Whose enforcers must be trained,
A superorganism

Altering within its parts,
By season, from day to day,
In how it self-regulates.

Thinking about this won’t help
You with your border police,
Your riot soldiers, that judge

Annoyed with your insolence,
Your manager making sure
That you’ve cleaned out your office.

But as you humiliate
Each other for enforcement,
Bear in mind there is no law

Other than arbitrary
In your tumultuous swarm
Struggling to ride herd on Earth.