A Call to Mercy

My poem for Human Rights Day (every day) and podcast with Charles Eisenstein who penned "Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed"

What might make justice divine? Perhaps, poetry. Deepening on the injustices happening towards people who are unvaccinated for COVID-19, I have released a poem into the wild and somewhat ruthless landscape of our time: “A Call to Mercy This Human Rights Day,” which was on Friday, December 10, 2021. But Human Rights Day is every day. We must be careful not to lose our humanity while fighting for humanity itself.

Watch the 4-minute recording of my reading below and find the sources in the video description. Then I invite you to watch my interview with Charles Eisenstein who penned the essay “Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed.” I feel humbled, grateful, and blessed to have gathered with Charles for this conversation. His ancestors are Russian and Polish Jews, and his lineage, in part, sensitizes him to dehumanization in all forms. Our episode of “Leaving the Left for Liberty” on Free the People explores why dehumanization is a delusion that can cloud one’s ability to see the truth. And the truth is made of all of us, including the suppressed voices lifted in this poem:

A Call to Mercy This Human Rights Day

by Sienna Mae Heath

Human Rights Day is on Friday
But maybe you didn’t get the memo
That grocery store owners of New Brunswick, Canada
Can deny their fellows,
The unvaccinated.
That calling them “the unvaccinated”
Could be a deadly shift in language
But it seems my kind don’t even deserve
People-first phrasing.

Instead you call me crazy
You say if people don’t get a Covid shot
They deserve everything that happens to them
Well let’s put that theory to a rapid test
Because Human Rights Day is on Friday
And maybe you didn’t get the memo

That a woman in Indonesia
Tried to report an attempted rape
On her body, her temple
And she was turned away
Because she, too, was deemed
Undesirable, unclean – unvaccinated.

If you call her choice conspiracy, maybe you don’t see
Humanity’s humanity
Grinded down by government directives
Direction fracturing connection
Sections in society for who is deemed worthy
Governed by cruelty, masked as ingenuity.

Now I know that this virus has taken
Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons
Husbands and wives.
We’re all at our wit’s end,
But why do some pretend
That some lives matter more than others?

Human Rights Day is on Friday
But maybe you didn’t get the memo
That another woman traveling through Sinai
Sought refuge in her native Israel
At a hospital where policemen used unhinged force and feeling,
Reeling, reprimanding this rape victim for violating quarantine?

An obscene demanding for her compliance
In exchange for her silence.
And then the policeman had the nerve to fine her friend
Raping, again, humanity’s humanity
Each man and woman and child’s right
To dignity
To mercy
To the faith
That man, our fellow man, might care to co-create a morsel of compassion.

But rather we crumble at the sight of each other’s sins
And shudder at salvation
And the truth of creation.

The truth!
The truth given to Moses on Mount Sinai
– Sinai meaning “hatred” –
A hatred born from brewing envy of the Jews
Who were chosen to receive God’s Word.

On Mount Sinai,
God granted Moses the Ten Commandments,
Among others long denied:
Thou shall not make yourself an idol
And thou shall not steal.
In other words,
Thou shall not put any man’s will above God’s
And thou shall not steal another’s humanity.

Why don’t you see?
Why turn a blind eye to the Israelis
– Descendants of the slaves of Babylon –
Who marched in this the year 2021
Beneath a banner of a yellow star
Pictured between a green passport and a band of numbers of a human wrist.

“Resist!” protestors cry around the world
Echoing the cries of the Israelis on those ancient streets
– A new strain of warning met with scorning
Of yellow stars in 2021.

One for all and all for one
Or so I thought.

Why are we so easily bought by this rendition of World War II?
Are none of us immune to this culture of suspicion
Or to this variant of the human condition?
Now I know, history may not repeat itself
But history rhymes.

So I’ll say it one more time:
Human Rights Day is every day
But maybe we didn’t get the memo
That corrupt control plagues our world
That coercion is not consent
That humanity is due for an urgent ascent,
Rapid tests and a monumental awakening
Because if we forfeit our right to choose,
If we have learned nothing,
We will all lose in the end.

***

Watch and share my short reading if you feel called to:

Watch my interview with Charles Eisenstein here:

Charles Eisenstein raises concerns about the demonization of people who are unvaccinated for COVID-19 and analyzes the patterns of scapegoating and fanaticism throughout much of the world’s history—from the witch trials to the Holocaust to 9/11. Charles explains the origins of the Left's identification with science (as an institution) and the assumptions built into progressivism that progress is deeply linked with scientific-technological ambition. We also talk about why “following The Science” has become a secular religion of sorts with the ritual being vaccination in order to be granted inclusion into society. If you feel like a heretic of our time or are curious to understand that role, this episode is for you. Its intro is bold, while the conversation transcends our material reality by reaching for a more spiritual one.