The Human Condition - A Sonnet Poem by Richard St. Clair

I've often wondered how our race survives
Despite endemic suffering and hardship,
Under the tyrant's unrelenting bullwhip,
A challenge to preserve our very lives.
Totalitarianism on the rise—
Inflamed by rhetoric and hatred grim,
Subject to the bully's every whim—
Coaxes tears from countless troubled eyes.
Many millions live is coddled ease
While billions more eke out a bleak existence,
Surviving by a desperate persistence,
Lashed by hunger, war, need, and disease.
Is this bad luck, a cynical dice thrown,
Or by a helter-skelter karma blown?