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Pity the Nation – A poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti (After Khalil Gibran) 2007 – posted 8/22/2025
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
Who allow their rights to erode
And their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!
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Jonathan P. Baird 
The nation whose breath is money. It stinks of corruption.
Totally unrelated: a brush-with-fame story. One of our neighbors where I grew up in Santa Rosa was an artist named Maury Lapp who did a lot of painting in San Francisco. One of his sons (I used to babysit him and his brother) recently sent a post card sized print of his dad’s painting of City Lights Books, the original of which hung in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s office for many years.
That is cool! I love that bookstore and I always stop there whenever I make it to SF.