Love Needs Binoculars: a poem

Love Needs Binoculars

The sun is lovely in the sky.
On the sun's surface you will fry.
What, from this, do we learn?
Love from afar, or else burn.

That girl is pretty, yes it's true,
But no prettier standing next to you.
Closer she gets, the sharper her flaws:
A huge Adam's apple and a hairy jaw.

Silent, mysterious, far away,
Your heart can always have its say.
Bring her closer, into your life,
Soon you'll be stuck with a wife.

Sex, in fantasy, always goes well.
No fumbling, rashes, or awkward smells.
No bra strap struggles or pregnancies.
And don't get me started on S.T.Ds.

So to summarize these frantic rants,
Keep your passion in your pants.
I hope you think my reasoning fine.
(Because now I'll make your woman mine.)

Two Nonsense Poems

The Penguin That Never Was

The stillborn penguin
has three hairs on his chin.
One red, one black, and one blonde.
He says, quite grave,
"I never will shave,
until the entire rainforest is gone."

The stillborn penguin
loves Joseph Stalin.
They surfed together in Guam.
Friends for many years,
through laughter and tears.
They did two tours in 'Nam.

It's amazing to see
what can be achieved
by a dead baby bird in a jar.
The president wrote
him a lengthy love note
and married him in a gay bar.

When it's late at night
and the wind is just right
you can hear the penguin's bark.
It's short and it's shrill
and it gives me a thrill
like stabbing myself in the dark.

* * *

Love Poem for Lonely Lepers

Love, she said, is a pleasant thing
like kicking a dog in the ass.
Like stabbing a rabbit in both eyes
or destroying a loony's day pass.

Love, he said, is a wonderful joy,
like murdering a kitten with sticks.
Like voiding your bowels on the blind
or stealing a junkie's last fix.

They met in a bar,
and their love went far --
as far as a rock can be thrown.
And when it was done
there was no more fun
but at least they were both alone.

Love, they said, is a great chore
like shovelling dirt from a ditch.
Like cremating a box of hand grenades
or watching a dying dog's twitch.

If there was no love,
and no heaven above,
and no hell full of very sad moans,
I would be more happy,
a lot less sappy,
and I'd stop writing stupid poems.

My Migraine Secrets

Recently, I mentioned a little bit about my migraines. I thought I'd spill the whole story, which is a lot weirder than I'd let on.

* * *

I was thirteen or fourteen when I had my first attack, walking home from delivering newspapers one summer afternoon. I remember feeling happy. It was a gorgeous day, and the sun shone through the green, fresh leaves of a tree overhead. Everything seemed alive and real.

“Let me see the crystal,” I said, out loud, to no one, smiling as I spoke. I have no idea why I said those words. They just slipped out.

And then it hit me, from out of nowhere. Not so much a headache as a nausea behind my eyes. A distorted, jangling light -- very much like a crystal -- danced in the centre of my vision. It throbbed and spun, an insane, scintillating diamond that would not sit still. No matter where I looked, the distortion was there, stuck in the centre of everything.

It hurt, I felt sick, but not in my stomach -- in my head. Like my brain wanted to throw up. Stumbling home, I found my mother in the kitchen. I tried to describe what was happening to me, and saw this bizarre fear in my mother’s face.

“It’s nothing,” she said, her eyes wide with anxiety. “Lie down in your room for a while. You'll be fine.”

After an hour or so of lying in my room, my vision returned to normal. I felt tired, but okay. A little shaky. And very confused.

What had happened to me? What was this experience? And why had I spoken out loud, just before it happened? “Let me see the crystal,” and then I’m hit with this crystal-like distortion to my vision. What the hell did it mean? It didn't feel random. It felt like it meant something.

I didn’t talk about it, at dinner. Assuming we even sat down to a family dinner, that evening. We didn't always do that. If we did, it's not like we sat there in silence. My parents have been at war with each other for decades. Screaming and yelling and fighting for dominance was the only thing to talk about. There was little room for subtle matters like weird optic dysfunction.

All the same, as an adult, I can’t understand why or how I kept my mouth shut. The experience was so bizarre, so out of the ordinary. I think part of it came from the way my mother reacted. Her panicked statement -- “Everything is fine!” -- scared the hell out of me. It made me think this was something I wasn't supposed to talk about. I felt as if there was some sort of conspiracy going on.

The symptoms have started, I imagined my mother thinking. Soon he'll be dead. Best to keep him ignorant, the poor kid.

She really did react like she’d been expecting this moment her whole life, but wasn’t capable of dealing with it. And maybe that's true -- maybe she'd always worried one of her kids would get sick and die. So when I came walking into the house describing some bizarre symptoms, her reaction was fear and denial.

"Everything is fine!"

Which only made my situation all the more painful, confusing, and bizarre.

There were so many things going on in my life then that we just didn’t talk about. Puberty, porn, masturbating, stealing dad’s porn mags from his bedside table -- this new thing was just another item on the list. Just another secret.

My family has all sorts of odd secrets. My father was driving me home from school one day, when he accidentally said something about his ex-wife. Then he realized what he'd just said, and he looked all embarrassed and strange for a moment.

I felt a weird and crazy panic. I didn't know what to say. Ex-wife? What the hell was he talking about? This was the first I'd heard of any of this.

Later, my mother sat down my sister and I and told us. Our father had been married before, in Germany. He'd had a daughter -- our half sister -- who was still alive, and in Germany. His wife had kicked him out, because my dad was a drunk. He has since given up booze completely.

"We decided not to tell you any of this," my mom said, "because we thought it would be confusing."

The only thing more confusing than telling us, was not telling us.

To this day, I don't know my half-sister's name. I don't even know if she's still alive. My mother told us at one point that our half-sister was "very sick". Whether that was just a passing illness or something chronic, I have no idea.

I never asked my parents for more information about this sister of mine. The subject still feels taboo and creepy. Something we're not allowed to discuss. My parents buried it, and then let us know just a little bit about it. Digging it up again would be... uncomfortable.

My attacks felt similar to this -- terrain that we weren't allowed to discuss.

* * *

After the first attack, I had one about once a month. Taking my cue from my mother, I told no one about them. Fear, embarrassment, other complex feelings -- I bottled it all up.

Somehow, even when the attacks happened at school, I managed to hide that I was having them. I’d stumble down the halls, in pain, ignoring everyone and everything. It was grade nine, the beginning of high school. Maybe my teachers thought I was experimenting with drugs. Maybe they thought I was just stupid. Or maybe I was really good at hiding the pain.

I had no idea what the attacks were. I didn't tell anyone about them. But I did my best to make sense of them.

It felt like I'd asked for the experience. “Let me see the crystal.” It was an invitation. Something, or someone, had given me a choice.

"Have these attacks," this thing said, "and you'll become a different person. Don't have these attacks, and remain normal and dull. Now, choose."

Evidently I chose the crystal. But the offer must have been made on an unconscious level, because the bargain seemed to have nothing to do with me. At least, not consciously.

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick didn't exactly help me out. In two of his novels, "Radio Free Albermuth" and "VALIS" he talks about alien satellites trying to communicate with human beings. These novels were fictionalized accounts of a real life experience Dick underwent -- he believed VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System, was trying to change him, heal him, or possibly heal the universe.

For a while, I wondered if that was what happened to me. Were my attacks some kind of alien communication?

Some entity somewhere else offered me information and I accepted it. Maybe each attack was the "satellite" getting in touch and giving me data. It was all being downloaded into my unconscious mind.

Dick's science fiction gave me a semi-useful model for contemplating my experiences. But in the end, I was an innocent, overweight adolescent suffering from a stressful home life. Philip K. Dick was a drug abusing, science fiction writing, insane adult. Our experiences didn't mesh.

Besides science fiction, another not-so-useful source of help was comic books.

I delivered newspapers to a barber shop, right next to a great store that sold magazines, cigarettes, and cigars. They also had comic books. Super heroes never did anything for me. “Swamp Thing” and “I, Vampire” were my favourites.

And there was “House of Mystery”. Each comic featured three “Twilight Zone” type stories about some spooky, supernatural happening. One particular story seemed directed at me, like a personal message from the universe.

There’s a hack artist who is ripping everyone off, copying their style. He is a bad man, in some indefinable way. He is approached by a mysterious figure. A man in a suit, with a suitcase.

“Do you want to be a better artist?” the stranger asks.

“Of course, it’s all I want.” But it isn’t true. He doesn't want artistic skill. What he wants is success and fame.

“Then take this crystal cube," the man says. "When you are ready to be an artist, smash it into pieces. It will give you the vision you require. But are you sure you’re brave enough to do it?”

And the stranger leaves.

For a long time the artist has the cube, and does nothing with it. He can’t convince himself that this situation is for real. It’s just a cube, after all. So what? Smashing it will do nothing.

But for some reason he gets desperate, frightened, needy. Maybe he needs the money, or maybe he has run out of stolen ideas. He smashes the cube.

And then we see the world from his perspective. Everything is art, and he can’t cope with it. He sees a man as having an apple for a head, the walls are bleeding, everything is surreal and distorted and strange. He has gone insane.

Is this story about me? I asked myself. Did I smash the crystal when I asked to see it?

I knew it was insane to think this way -- aliens are trying to communicate with me, or I've been offered magic powers -- but I was young, alone, confused, and dealing with an experience that made no sense. It felt like there was no one to turn to. So why not look to a dead, insane, science fiction author? His experiences, at least, seemed similar to my own. Why not look to comic books for answers?

Where else could I turn for help?

* * *

A year later, I found out what my attacks were. A kid at school complained to our teacher he was suffering from a migraine. They’d messed up the prescription on his glasses and it was causing specific symptoms. He described some of them -- and they sounded the same as mine.

I hate to admit how happy this made me. I grilled the kid for more details, much to his discomfort -- he was in the middle of an attack. But I desperately needed to know more. A visual distortion? A sort of head nausea? No matter where you look, the distortion is there? And it looks sort of like a crystal?

"Yes, yes, please stop talking about it," he pleaded.

“Migraine,” I remembering saying out loud, happy to finally know what was going on. Having a name for my experiences changed everything. I was no longer alone.

I tried to do research on migraines. Neurologist Oliver Sachs wrote a book on the subject, and several times I thought it might be a good idea to read it. But each time I picked it up and flipped through it, I felt like a migraine could come crashing down at any moment. To this day, I have yet to read it.

In many ways, I'm lucky. My migraines aren't severe. They usually pass after an hour or so. I have visual distortions, a sense of nausea, and not much else. Other people are crippled for days, actually throw up repeatedly, and so on.

In part, I think it was the secrecy that messed me up. Not talking about my migraines was a big part of my migraine mythology. It was my secret. My mother had inadvertently convinced me to pretend everything was fine. At the same time, I entertained this very powerful fantasy that this thing was killing me.

Any day now, I thought, I will drop dead and these things will be over.

Thinking about migraines, reading about them, or even talking about them meant I could have a migraine. So I did research only sporadically. And I hardly ever talked about my experiences.

The longer I went, not telling anyone about it, the weirder it felt. If I went to a doctor now, I thought, and said I'd been suffering these things in silence for years, what would they say?

"Why didn't you see a doctor sooner?" they would ask.

And what answer did I have? None. I felt like an idiot.

* * *

I was on my way to visit a friend when I was hit by a car. I was riding my bike on the sidewalk, on the wrong side of the street. The car clipped my rear wheel and I fell to the ground. I wasn’t hurt, but I immediately went into a migraine. Stress is a big trigger for me. The people driving the car were tourists, and drove me to the hospital, which was only a few blocks away.

Ironically, I had been on my way to the hospital. My friend was working there in one of the gift shops.

When I got to the hospital, I was secretly overjoyed. Finally, a doctor was going to look into my eyes and tell me what was wrong with my vision. Everything would be great. Finally, someone would know about my migraines.

I did see a doctor, and he did look in my eyes. I told him all about my symptoms -- leaving out the part about how I'd been having these for years and years. But nothing came of it. He said my eyes were fine. He told me it was probably just a stress reaction. I could stay at the hospital for as long as I wanted, but I was free to go at any time.

This was a huge disappointment. I'd expected the doctor to look into my eyes, see I was having a migraine, magically know I'd been having them for years, and offer useful and helpful advice. Instead, I got a familiar refrain:

"It's just stress."

* * *

Eventually, it became easier to talk about my migraines. This was partly due to my not having them as often as I used to. Living with my parents was an extremely stressful experience. After I moved out, my migraines were much less frequent.

I told a few friends about the whole "Let me see the crystal!" moment. One woman I knew, who was very religious, suggested I had opened myself up to the dark forces of Satan. The Dark Lord came to me and said, "I will give you magic powers!" and I let him in. Clearly I needed to pray, have an exorcism, etc.

I actually considered this possibility for about half an hour, before dismissing it. Which goes to show how desperate I was for answers.

Another friend had a much simpler explanation -- auras. People who suffer from migraines are sometimes compared to people who suffer from epilepsy. Often, before a seizure or migraine hits, there is an aura -- an experience of some kind that indicates a seizure is about to happen. It can be a smell or a taste or a sound. Smelling burnt toast is an example many are familiar with.

"In my case," my friend told me, "I find I lose my ability to talk. I was in a McDonald's once, about to have a migraine. The woman at the counter said, 'What would you like?' I wanted to say, 'I'll have a Big Mac.' But all I could say was 'Mac! Mac!' I felt like an idiot. And then the migraine hit."

While this explanation was more reasonable than alien satellites or talking to unconscious beings from another dimension, I hated his explanation. I still do. My aura was so very specific and strange. "Let me see the crystal!" and then I see this crystalline distortion in my vision. It was too much of a coincidence. Too perfect. It had to mean something.

But that's what human beings do, isn't it? Random events get strung into a story. We try to find meaning in everything -- including, and perhaps especially, those things that have no meaning.

Still, I cling to this idea that something asked me if I wanted to have migraines, and I said yes. Who would I be without these migraines, after all? They put a distance between me and the world, they gave me a new way of seeing. They changed me.

That can't be entirely random, can it?

No!

I discreetly snapped this photo of the dog poop sign, to prove it exists. Upon closer inspection, it appears to be made out of metal, and not wood as I had previously stated. That should have been obvious, as it's rusting around the edges.


The no dog shit sign.
The sign is a thing of pure horror, aesthetically speaking. It causes me to cringe in the same way I do when I touch my tongue to an aching tooth -- in the mouth of my long dead grandmother.

Emotional Eye Explosions: Migraines

I was with my friend Derek, and expected we were going to sit in the park and talk for hours, like we usually did.

"I need to go downtown," Derek said. "Let's go to the market."

I sighed, got to my feet, and started walking along side of him. I'd really wanted to sit and talk. I rarely got to see Derek, and there were several matters I wanted to discuss. But it looked like we were going to be stuck doing what he wanted to do. Again.

Derek was like that. His demands, his needs always came first. It was extremely difficult for me to fight for my own wants. Instead, I always went along with his latest plan.

As we walked, my heart started beating furiously. And there was a pain in my chest -- sharp, throbbing. What the hell was it? Maybe I was having a heart attack. Was I about to die? I decided to ignore it. My body makes all sorts of annoying noises. Despite asking myself if I was about to drop dead, I decided I didn't care.

In a few minutes, the pain was gone, and I was fine. By that point we were half-way to the market. Derek hadn't noticed my discomfort, because I'd hidden it well.

It took an entire day for me to process what happened and to realized what that pain was -- an emotion. I really did not want to go to the market with Derek. My entire body was rebelling against the action, screaming at me:

"No, you fucker. Don't let Derek drag you along again. You don't want to go. You don't want to do this. Do something. Say something. Change the course of events. Don't just drift along in his wake."

But I didn't change course. Because part of me was saying, "This is a physical symptom. This is illness. This isn't emotion."

And part of me was too chickenshit to stand up to Derek.

Eventually my body gave up trying to tell me different. It gave up on the emotion.

"Fine, you idiot. Go with Derek. Stupid."

And that was the end of that particular moment of painful feeling.

I don't know how other people work, but I often mistake my emotions for physical symptoms. I watch a horror movie, and afterwards I feel weird and dissociative. What the hell? Am I having some kind of a stroke? Is this it? The end of me?

No. It takes me a long time to process what's really going on. I just watched a horror movie that did its job well. The movie just freaked me out.

This leaves me wondering -- what other physical symptoms do I experience, and call illness or disease, when they're actually emotions? Are there more?

* * *

When I was fourteen, I had my first migraine headache. I was walking down the street, happy, life was good. I'd just finished delivering my newspapers on my route. I stared up at some leaves, the sun shining through them.

WHAM! This bizarre crystal pattern danced in my vision. I felt brain nausea -- like I wanted to throw up, but my stomach was located behind my eyes.

I made it home and said to my mother: "Something is wrong," and started describing my symptoms.

My mother freaked out. "Everything is fine! Just lie down for a while!"

Her panicked reassurance that everything was fine -- when obviously everything wasn't fine at all -- freaked me out even more. But I did as she said and went up to my room. I lay there for a while and the migraine passed.

After that, I had migraines on and off for years. Sometimes they were as often as once a month. Sometimes I go years without having one. If I realize one is starting to come on, I can stop it -- by closing my eyes, leaning back, and relaxing as hard as I can. If I do this, there's no guarantee I'll avoid having a migraine, but usually it passes more quickly.

When I did research on migraines, I found this bizarre split down the middle of the migraine world: the pro-stress and the anti-stress groups. A lot of sufferers insist quite vocally that there is no connection between stress and migraines. I suspect this is because the idea of psychosomatic illness is so very frustrating.

"It's all in your head."

"It's just stress."

"You just need to learn how to relax."

When a doctor says these words, it's tempting to punch them in the face.

"Ow! You punched me in the face!"

"Yes, I did. But you just need to avoid my fist."

Punch, punch!

Relax? Yeah, doc, I'd like to relax, but every now and then I have this torturous pain rip through my eyeballs, and I want to puke my brain out of my mouth. Funny how that can interfere with my ability to relax.

Most doctors are hurried, blunt, and eager to move on to the next ten patients in the waiting room. Saying "psychosomatic illness" sounds like an answer, if your goal is to treat life threatening illnesses as quickly as possible.

Let's face it -- migraines suck, but they're not exactly life threatening. And if it's psychosomatic, from the doctor's point of view the problem is solved.

"It's not cancer. Next patient, please!"

From the patient's point of view, nothing is changed, and the doctor has just walked out of the room.

Is it any wonder so many migraine sufferers insist stress isn't a factor? That it's a real illness, like epilepsy? They want to be taken seriously. Being told, "It's just stress!" doesn't help.

What sets off a migraine is called a "trigger". You know what can trigger a migraine? Seemingly anything.

Chocolate. Caffeine. Red Wine. Processed meat. Old cheeses. MSG. Yeast. Or skipping meals altogether. Changes in the weather. Changes in sleep patterns. An excess of over the counter medications. A strong perfume. Hormone levels.

Every migraine sufferer is different, and we all seem to have different triggers. (See this PDF for more more triggers.)

One trigger does make sense for me -- light. What set off my first migraine was staring up at the light passing through leaves. It took a long time for me to figure that out. Light shining through window blinds set me off on several occasions, leading me to finally identify this trigger. It's that dappled dark and light pattern that makes my brain go boom.

But another trigger of mine is one that many migraine sufferers insist is taboo. And that's stress.

I had this proved to me one day when I was biking to a friend's house. I was riding my bike on the sidewalk down the wrong side of a busy street. A brilliant move on my part. Fortunately for me, I was an adolescent at the time, and therefore immortal.

Well, almost. A car turned into my bike, clipping my back wheel and sent me flying. I hit the ground, stunned and amazed and confused. And I was suddenly having a migraine.

Unless the bumper of the car was covered in chocolate and red wine, it's a safe bet that stress was the trigger.

Lately, I find myself wondering a strange question. What if a migraine isn't a medical condition? What if it's an emotion?

When Derek said, "Let's go downtown," and dragged me off against my will, my heart sped up and I thought I was having a heart attack. I didn't want to go, and speaking my mind felt impossible, and my body responded with a physical yell.

What if a migraine is something similar? My body screams for attention. I don't know how to process it. I don't know what it means. I think it's a physical symptom. But it's actually an emotion.

But what emotion is contained in a migraine? My best guess:

"I cannot deal with this shit! Let's shut down for a moment! Let's go somewhere dark and quiet and alone and just be by ourselves, without any stimulus, without anything to distract us! Let's just get the fuck away from everything!"

Migraine as panic attack. Migraine as a retreat from the world. It seems like a possible explanation.

Migraines also feel like a lot of emotion, all at once -- too intense to process. Like trying to push a block of ice through a funnel. It jams in there, and the brain explodes. It's all too much to process.

Maybe it's like an emotional synesthesia. Some people see things when they hear sounds. Some see colours when they look at words. It could be that a migraine is an emotional outburst in visual form.

I'm not sure what to do with any of these thoughts. I am throwing them out into the world to see what people make of it.

I have a hard time talking about my migraines, because the very act of talking about it sometimes makes me feel like I'm about to have one. So I'll shut up now.

Dog Shit Sign

A neighbour of mine has a wooden sign on his front lawn, shaped like a tiny white terrier, in profile, taking a crap. You can tell the dog is taking a crap because of the way its back is arched. Plus there's a little brown blob hanging out of its white butt. The sign is the size of a dinner plate, and written on the dog's side is "NO!"

The sign is a paradox. This neighbour obviously doesn't want dogs taking a crap on his lawn. In order to prevent that, he has put an ugly sign of a dog taking a crap on his lawn. So, in a sense, there is always a dog pooping there. Forever.

It's like that old schoolyard joke. A child comes home with a turd in his hand. He proudly shows the shit to his mother. "Look what I almost stepped in!"

The dog shit sign feels aggressive, crazy, and homemade -- a crack in a person's mind, put on display for everyone to see. Like a flag of madness. While I usually can appreciate that kind of flag, this one is so depressing. And anal.

"I declare war on dog shit! And I simultaneously celebrate dog shit!"

I have never seen this neighbour. I know nothing about him. For some reason, I assume he's a man, because the nature of his paradox strikes me as masculine. The sign destroys the lawn before it can be destroyed by real dog shit.

"You can't fire me! I quit!"

We have all seen this sort of thing before -- in cartoons. There's a guy, and he's trying to lay out a perfect cement sidewalk. Only, every time it's nice and smooth, Bugs Bunny or Sylvester or some damn cartoon critter runs through, leaving tracks in the cement. The man starts over, gets the sidewalk smooth again. And then the cartoon critter ruins it. The cycle repeats a few times.

Frustrated, the guy sees Sylvester or Bugs or whoever running his way, about to ruin the cement. So what does he do? He ruins it himself, before they can ruin it. He leaps on to the cement and does a crazy dance, making tracks everywhere. He does it with a manic triumph. He has gone insane, embraced the chaos, lost it.

And then the cartoon critter runs past, without going anywhere near the cement. Our worker turns purple and dies of a heart attack or a stroke.

That's what I think this dog shit sign is like, only quieter. A sort of suburban madness. He's not ranting on a street corner about the horribleness of dog poop, but he's close.

That's pretty much all I have to say about that.

The System Eats Dead Canaries for Breakfast

This New York Times blog post is sure to piss off a lot of anarchists. But then again, it's so easy to piss off an anarchist.

Protesters Fail to Bring Down Global Capitalism With Costumes and Puppets
By Robert Mackey

Reading about protesters dressed as the Grim Reaper and carrying effigies of dead canaries led to the following thought process.

* * *

"The system sucks and it has to change!"

"What sucks about it?"

"Profits are put before people!"

"So what's the alternative?"

"People before profits!"

"And how do we do that, exactly?"

"The system sucks! Abolish the system!"

"And replace it with what?"

"Nothing! Anarchy!"

"And that will make things better?"

"You bet it would!"

"And who would fix the sewers? Who would keep the drinking water clean? How would people get the food and shelter they require? Right now, people suffering in poverty can get social assistance. What happens to them when there is no system?"

"I don't know. I don't have any answers to those questions. But it would work out, somehow."

"What if we reform the existing system, instead of abolishing it?"

"No way! The system is corrupt! It needs to be torn down! Power to the people!"

"Whatever that means?"

"Exactly! No, wait! Are you making fun of me?"

"I think you're making fun of yourself."

* * *

Am I the only person who sees what's going on and thinks of the French Revolution? It's not so much that the protesters want change -- they just want all the rich people who hoard their wealth to be taken to the guillotine. Bizarrely, the protesters haven't even realized that's what they want. At least, not yet.

While I disagree with it, maybe killing all the rich people is a reasonable approach. It's the easiest way to make sure wealth isn't pooled in a small percentage of human beings. Murder them and take their wealth. Burn their mansions to the ground. Mind you, wealth is no longer in land or factories or possessions. So it's harder to take away. But presumably it could be done.

For now, the protesters all talk about The System. It's not people, it's The System that is corrupt. It's The System that makes it so wealth isn't distributed evenly.

At some point, the protesters will wake up and realize that wearing funny costumes, and throwing bricks at McDonald's, and tangling with the riot police isn't going to change anything. Instead, they protesters will organize better, and start systematically assassinating the wealthy. Just like with the French Revolution. But in order for that to happen, things will have to become pretty desperate. You know, like some sort of economic crisis. If we ever get one of those.

I'm not advocating any of this. I personally think murder is a Very Bad Thing. But the train of thought the protesters are riding seems to have a final destination -- the French Revolution.

Of course, the icky part of the French Revolution comes afterwards -- durng the Reign of Terror. What do you do with the world, after you've murdered all the rich people, and now you're in power? What do you do when the peasants want to start killing the revolutionaries?

I'd be interested in hearing what protesters and anarchists think about all of this. You know, should they wish to educate me.

(Of course, the only thing easier than pissing off an anarchist is getting them ranting and raving about what everyone should believe.)

Let the shit storm commence!

(In other words, please leave a comment.)