Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Revolution Is Here

- Are the revolutionaries still camped in the park?
- The city of New York took away their generators as a health hazard.
- When did that happen?
- Yesterday. They are still there.
- What will they do? It's beginning to snow.
- They ordered five pedal powered generators last week. They'll stay.
- It's hopeless. The Soviet Union killed millions of its own people. The U.S. government will do the same.
- Russians were used to serfdom, were rural, impoverished and unequipped. Americans are used to the ideas if not the practice of freedom, live mostly in cities, and have four hundred million guns.
- The army has more and bigger guns.
- Some people are easier to kill than others. Some revolutions are different than others. Poverty, fear, hatred are causes for revolution, but not the good kind. Americans went against England and they were not poor, not afraid, not intoxicated with hatred. A point had been reached where a large number believed that without change their lives would be not worth living.
- And you think Americans again have reached that point?
- I do. If you are forced to take a job you don't want, live where you don't want, because if you refuse you'll have no job and no place to live, you are a slave. You resign yourself to the condition. You laugh at, you pity your employers and landlords for their inhumanity. It doesn't work for long. Human beings are beautiful in their pity and laughter, but they also want other things, they want to make friends, love, create. These things cannot be done by slaves. Slaves have no chance to be fully human. Their lives are not worth living. When they know it they rebel.