I had a vision of Charles Koch standing handcuffed on a platform. His brother, David, was next to him, on his knees, his head secured in a guillotine. The blade was released and fell with lightning speed. David’s head tumbled to the wooden planks below while blood gushed from his neck.
Looking away, past the limp headless body, I saw that Charles was only at the head of a line, which seemed endless. Some of the faces were familiar, most not. Men and women. I even spotted Melinda Gates. “Hi, Melinda.” And there was poor William Koch. Talk about having to suffer for your brothers’ sins! It seemed wrong to cut off the heads of Melinda and William. Melinda is so pretty and William has that friendly face. It all seemed wrong. I am not violent. I am not vengeful. But we—Homo sapiens—are very violent and vengeful.
I thought of Howard Zinn, who wrote in The Progressive, back in 2003:
I’ve no doubt my vision will be realized. There is no amount of money or guards or political power that will save the elite[1] from thousands of angry, hopeless peasants. The question is not if, but when and how.
Be assured, however, that I will be there to protect these people. I will say that violence is not the way. I will physically get between the angry and the “Winners!” And also be assured that I will be as impotent in these endeavors as I now am to stop the cruel injustice that leads there.
But I will not shed a tear for them. Any of them.[2]
[1] Amazing how conservatives have managed to redefine “elites” as college professors rather than Presidents and billionaires!
[2] Paul Krugman has an excellent column today, America’s Unlevel Field. In it, he discusses how America is now more class-constrained than Europe and how all the Republican Party talk of evening the playing field is bunk.
It’s a patently stupid attempt at leveling the playing field between science and religion. Science has no choice but to encroach on the gaps in our knowledge that religion attempts to caulk over with doctrine. By calling evolution a religion, they think it somehow reduces the explanatory power of evolution for the life sciences.
@victoria falls – I don’t know what you’re talking about.