The Choir of Untold Millions

Guernica, Stalingrad, Guatemala, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, Iraq, The Congo, Haiti and the list goes on and on, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, the same story, the same headlines, the same suffering of untold millions, keening an elegy of misery and terror.

The unfolding tragedy in Haiti is more than a natural disaster. It is the aftermath of centuries of imperialist oppression of the Haitian people for which we as Americans are largely responsible. Other human catastrophes throughout the world are likewise the result of an inhumane system of abuse and exploitation that persists to this day and will only become heightened as our planet's precarious ecological balance becomes increasingly unhinged due to an unsustainable Western life style built on the backs of indigenous people throughout the world resulting in deforestation, globing warming and other environmental crimes.

Here we have a poem written by my father Eugene Victor Etler, when he was in his twenty’s, 70 odd years ago, that could have been written yesterday, today or tomorrow.

The Choir of Untold Millions
-- Eugene V. Etler

Listen to a song of misery
Listen to a song of terror
Listen to it swell and break
Upon the eroded shores of humanity

Listen to it well
Listen to it as a murmur
Swell to a roar of thunder
Listen to this song of misery
Listen to this song of terror

Listen to this choir
Of untold millions
Haunting the strings
Of embittered instruments.

Listen to this choir
Lifted to this song
Not in the voice of God
But to the taunting strings of misery.

And these voices lifted in song
Shall haunt the souls of men
The souls of men
Who pointed their fingers of scorn
At these the disinherited.

Listen to their song of misery
Listen to their song of terror
Down the corridors of time
Their haunted notes of misery
Their haunted notes of terror
Shall re-echo a thousand-fold times,

And the laughter of man shall cease
And the chatter of human voices
Will finally come to an end
And all motion will be stilled
For all must be made aware
Of the forthcoming doom
Of the disinherited.

Their voices sing a song
Welded together in the name of discontent
Their song a wail
Leaving the strong pale
For the consequences of time
Has overtaken them.

We have listened to their song of misery
We have listened to their song of terror
And we do not know where to turn.

Their singing voices haunt us
Haunt us who have betrayed them
Our souls are wrecked
The waste of misery and terror
Has taken its toll
And darkness has overcome us.

Yet, we who have condemned the starving
We who have murdered the living
Stand with heads unbarred
Unbrunted to the shame of our deeds.

We who in our wild orgy danced
To the chant
That the starved must die
That the overworked must starve
That those who work must be overworked
And those who never worked
Shall never have the right to work.
Have heard this song of misery
Have heard this song of terror.

And our might is the fear of the people
And our fear is the might of the people.

Listen to this choir
Of untold millions strong
Men, women, children
Anguish in their voices
The anguish of the disinherited.