The Infection

We call it progress.

We call it freedom.

We call it survival.

But strip back the layers,

and what festers beneath are the old sicknesses,

the ancient wounds we never cleaned.

Pride

swells like a crown too heavy for the skull.

We mistake it for confidence, but it blinds us,

turns neighbors into enemies, turns kin into competition.

Greed

is the pulse of our markets,

a hunger that devours oceans, forests, and people.

We gorge while others starve,

and still we whisper; more, more, more.

Lust

burns, untempered,

not as desire, but as conquest.

We turn bodies into battlefields,

souls into collateral, and intimacy into transaction.

Envy

is the mirror we cannot stop staring into,

the venom we spit on one another’s joys.

Victory is not sweet, because someone else’s always tastes sweeter.

Gluttony

bloats our days with excess,

while children dig through scraps.

We feed machines instead of mouths.

We drown in plenty, yet feel hollow.

Wrath

writes our headlines.

Wrath is the anthem of our politics,

the inheritance of our nations.

We cradle our anger like a weapon,

point it at the first soft target, then fire without care.

Sloth

is not laziness but refusal.

Refusal to see, to change, to rise.

We choose the comfort of denial over the labor of repair.

Seven sins,

seven roots,

seven poisons poured into the soil of today.

And we pretend we do not drink from the river already tainted with their bile.

But, what if we stopped pretending?

What if we named the infection instead of dressing it in silks?

What if we peeled the rot back and let the wound breathe?

There is power in confession.

There is healing in truth.

If we saw how these sins thread through our every day, we could cut the strings.

We could stitch something cleaner.

We could choose humility instead of pride,

generosity instead of greed,

love instead of conquest,

gratitude instead of envy,

balance instead of excess,

forgiveness instead of fury,

and action instead of silence.

The seven sins do not have to reign.

The infection does not have to spread.

But, first

we must look at ourselves, long enough, and honest enough,

to admit what we’ve been carrying.

Only then will we see;

that we were always the cure.