"Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

What do American politicians treasure? Follow the money ... back to its source: the NRA and its rich, powerful, corrupt and corrupting gun lobby.

Our schools are like third-world nations
where only the strong survive.
Why? Follow the yellow brick road
to the gold-plated gun runners’ hive.
—Michael R. Burch

There’s truth in the political cartoon below. Americans care about children, and we are not amused by politicians who put political donations above their safety, happiness and lives. I have no doubt that politicians who make the wrong choices today will pay with their political careers tomorrow, as more children die in barrages of automatic weapons fire, while Americans learn that the United States is dead last among the world’s 28 wealthiest nations at preventing gun-related deaths. If Japan, Italy and Germany, the former Axis powers, can protect their children, then surely the world’s self-avowed “defender of democracy” can defend its most vulnerable citizens too. Let’s give politicians who favor the NRA over innocent children the boot, the democratic way, by expressing our displeasure at the polls. If you agree, please pass this link to your family and friends. — Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust, Darfur and Nakba poetry