It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I may have created a new written language while consciously dreaming. I was disappointed that the English language was so damn complex; so hard to learn. But it wasn’t hard to pronounce; just hard to write. Now, for example, you and I pronounce “horse” as hawrs, as we did back then. Before, though, we spelled the word that we pronounce as hawrs this way: fourfootedanimalwithamaneandhooves. The spelling of every damn word was like that! Imagine sitting down with a quill and ink and writing a letter to your grandfather’s uncle’s first grade teacher…what a nightmare! One morning, while enjoying a bowl of haggis and alligator ceviche for breakfast, a man knocked on our farmhouse door. I opened the door and he handed me a hand-written note. The first sentence of his missive was eleven pages long. I was illiterate, of course; I could not read his mass of incomprehensible letters. But then he said “hawrs.” Suddenly, it came to me! We should stop using the confusing blather; we should write words sort of like they sound. I wrote “horse” and showed it to him. He wept openly when he realized what had just happened. Within hours, he had earned his Ph.D. in Spelling. What a joyous occasion!
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When too much power—and a lust for even more—is concentrated in just a few nations and people, humanity begins to unravel. Both humankind (the species) and kindness (the characteristic) succumb to the overwhelming desire for dominance, which transforms cravings for strength and privilege into an incurable disease. The afflicted leaders, though, claim concentrated power will convert suffering into an indescribable, impossible utopian dream. And they insist that efforts to dilute such power justify any and all steps taken to silence their opponents. Those steps, they say, will reward people who conform to authoritarian leaders’ expectations and demands. Explosive insurgencies may be the only tactics that have a chance of ending what amounts to the dissolution of freedoms and all the horror that accompany such madness. If nothing else, sedition may be the final, heroic expression of humans’ collective desire to substitute freedom for slavery.
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The future, which present circumstances suggest will become only slightly more dystopian than the past, will remember only what newscasts and official government propaganda allow. Already, we have “learned” that the Holocaust, Slavery, the Moon Landing, and the Great Depression were video games triggered by the gradual cooling of our planet…made into films shown in Omnimax Theaters owned by Betty Friedan and Pablo Picasso’s youngest teenage daughter, Formalda Hyde, who just celebrated her fourth birthday. Down the road a ways, just around a bend on a switchback littered with marbles and ball-bearings, truth will be bottled and canned in patriotically-themed packaging. We now celebrate “strategery” as one of a thousand reasons we prefer George Bush and Genghis Khan to Kash Patel. But what will tomorrow bring?
When dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right.
~ Victor Hugo ~
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
~ John F. Kennedy ~
A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.
~ Fidel Castro ~
You can kill a revolutionary but you can never kill the revolution.
~ Fred Hampton ~
