There is trouble in the forest
And the creatures all have fled
As the maples scream “Oppression”
And the oaks just shake their heads
So the maples formed a union
And demanded equal rights
“The oaks are just too greedy
We will make them give us light”
Now there’s no more oak oppression
For they passed a noble law
And the trees are all kept equal
By hatchet, axe, and saw
The Trees
Great work Donald.
Thank you.
Sharing with others…
Don,
I’ve often reflected on that song and that verse.
There is also the song “Freewill” when I think of “The Nones”
“If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”
I like that. It’s a pithy summation of this passage from Screwtape Proposes a Toast.
But that is a mere by-product. What I want to fix your attention on is the vast,
over-all movement toward the discrediting, and finally the elimination, of every
kind of human excellence-moral, cultural, social or intellectual. And is it not
pretty to notice how democracy- in the incantatory sense-is now doing for US
the work that was once done by the most ancient dictatorships, and by the same
methods? You remember how one of the Greek dictators (they called them “tyrants” then) sent an envoy to another dictator to ask his advice about the principles of government. The second dictator led the envoy into a field of grain, and
there he snicked off with his cane the top of every stalk that rose an inch or so above
the general level. The moral was plain. Allow no pre-eminence among your subjects. Let no man live who is wiser, or better, or more famous, or even handsomer than the mass. Cut them a down to a level; all slaves, all ciphers, all nobodies. All equals. Thus tyrants could practice, in a sense, ‘democracy.” But now “democracy” can do the same work without any other tyranny than her own. No one need now go through the field with a cane. The little stalks will now of themselves bite the tops off the big ones. The big ones are beginning to bite off their own in their desire to Be Like Stalks.
Kurt Vonnegut wrote a short story “Harrison Bergeron” about a dystopian future that is looking increasingly like the one we are living in. In the story no one is allowed to excel. One of the characters is the Handicapper General Diana Moon Glampers. She and her agents enforce the equality laws. There is an article on Wikipedia that covers the story:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron