The first poem is from Ogden Nash, that doggerel-writer with a bite:

Everybody Tells Me Everything
I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens,
And that is why I do not like the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.

The second is by Ambrose Bierce, the American curmudgeon best known for his stories of the War between the States (1860-1865), his Devil’s Dictionary, a masterpiece of sarcasm, and his unreported death, presumably somewhere in the vicinity of Pancho Villa of Mexico.  Though one doesn’t think of Bierce as a kind person, his bitter skepticism was grounded in a high ideal for humanity: 

An Inscription
A conqueror as provident as brave,
He robbed the cradle to supply the grave.
His reign laid quantities of human dust:
He fell upon the just and the unjust.

Two independent thinkers for Independence Day.