MERCY ME?

I ponder what was said by a trumpolater on television about how he thinks we need a dictatorship which will ‘give us a good paddling’. I’d admire to ask that fool, who does he think needs paddling and why?
If he thinks big corporations who have all but entirely bought up our political process so they can become even more obscenely rich and never have to clean up the lethal pollution messes they love to make are the ones in need of chastisement, then the man’s onto something real. But he’s dangerously mistaken if he thinks Trump will ever paddle that lot; for that we need Bernie or one of his acolytes.
On the other hand, he might be brainwashed enough to want the ‘Myrka of 1953 back again and nailed into place permanently. Well, we certainly should up the tax rates and union-belonging percentage of the working people to what they were back then. But we neither can nor should cement the social relations to what they were back then. I suspect that’s really what that fool and his like yearn for!

I wouldn’t call myself a merciful man by nature. I also always ask myself, is it wise to extend mercy to those who will almost certainly see it as weakness and will break the peace as soon as they think they can get away with it? My hatred for bullies may well be pathological and my initial impulse is to wrench a horse-doctor’s dose of their toxins down their own throats. But at least these days, somewhere in the middle of all that and probably Deo Gratias, I ask myself: What else have these poor lumps of mostly unbaked dough ever known but such…