Unexpected political statement.

I also just dug this out of my "to be recycled" paper pile. Although written in haste and originally discarded in apathy, I figured it's worth a blog post. It's another assignment from a class, although this was a public speaking course, and the assignment was an impromptu speech to be given using a variety of literary techniques. We were assigned an individual idea, and we then had to express that idea colorfully enough for the class to guess what it was. My prompt was "a historical event." We were given just a few minutes to write, and as I started, I realized my words started sounding more poem-like than speech-like, so when I stood up to perform my own short piece, I read a poem instead:

Population is populating where prior, it did not exist.
Crawling, fighting, settling, dying:
White men, like a fire spreading across a nation,
And natives are wild brush turned tumbleweeds, then ash.
For the good of the nation,
For the good of the future,
For the good of all men,
Except those men who are less than men
Because they claimed desired land.
Torn away from homes, shoved across the nation,
Distinguished by their disintegration under evolution;
Towns replace tepees, civilization has come.
A movement of masses.
A separation of skins.
Something unjust,
They've yet to forgive.


After a pause of silence, one guy in the class yelled out "Manifest Destiny." I responded approvingly with a smile before sitting down.