"Ye are many--they are few." Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Mask of Anarchy"
Shelley wrote the above words in a fit of pique over the
Peterloo Massacre in Manchester, England in 1819. Sixty to eighty thousand people had gathered to protest their representation in the face of high unemployment and rates of poverty (sound familiar?)--government forces charged the crowd, killing 15 and wounding several hundred. Shelley wrote the
poem as a call to non-violent action, and the poem was known to have influenced Thoreau's
Civil Disobedience as well as being quoted by Gandhi in his speeches. Shelley, it should be noted, was quite wealthy, which might explain his use of "ye" rather than "we".
I waited a couple of days to write this post, because after reading this
piece about Ty Fahner, former Attorney General of Illinois and all around asshole, speaking at a meeting of the Union (their use of the word "union' made me want to take a shower to clean this shit out of my eyes) League Club of Chicago I was angry. Like Charlie Sheen in
Platoon angry--"...we need to frag his fucking ass!" Time has not cooled the anger.
Briefly, Fahner spoke of sabotaging the state of Illinois by whispering in the ears of ratings agencies (Moody's, Standard and Poor's) to downgrade the state's ratings, which in turn drives down bond rates, which are often bought by pension funds, and in the end, leaving funding for pensioners well short (we're talking police, firefighters, and teachers--as the piece notes, we're also talking roughly $32,000 a year, and they
do not collect social security in addition to that).
Now one assumes, that should Mr. Fahner find himself facing the gun of a criminal, that should the police be called, that he would expect the police officer to risk his life in an attempt to save Mr. Fahner. One would assume likewise of a fireman should Mr. Fahner find himself stuck in his burning home. One would also assume that since not all of us can afford to send our kids to private schools, and that since there are not nearly enough children of the wealthy to supply all the doctors, auto mechanics, clerks, or store mangers that our society requires, with that education provided specifically by teachers, that Mr. Fahner, like the rest of us, gets his money's worth on that one, too.
The social contract we have with all of the above is that for firefighers and policemen, they risk their lives for a small wage, but in return they can retire after 20 years with a decent pension. Likewise, with teachers, the idea is that they take less than they can make in the private sector, but catch up (modestly) on the back end of their lives.
What it is, is that psychopaths like Mr. Fahner want the services provided by public employees, but they just don't want to pay for them. They just want ordinary Americans to pay for them, so that he and people of his ilk get richer and richer, while the rest of us live in a state of perpetual poverty like the peons of old. Mr. Fahner and his ilk are the moneyed elite--they deserve it, but we pissants have to earn it.
My first question would be: how much better can mother fuckers like Mr. Fahner eat?
My second question is: how much longer are we going to put up with this shit?
Non-violent protest will only take you so far, and while reasoning may have worked with the moderate middle for Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., it's not a tactic that will work with members of the radical right (which today is the vast majority of the republican party) who think reasoning is for pussies.
There are two ways to deal with psychopaths--you either put them in jail until they die or you kill them.
It's as simple as that.
Peace,
emaycee
