Parable of the Week

The Powerless, The Powerful
A "right to vote" was enshrined in the Constitution of both neighboring peoples -- but immersed within a tortuous, dark palimpsest of corrupt laws.
In the first country, public officials, even the Presidency itself, were bought. Incumbency of the largest political parties was guaranteed by television ads -- which, through misdirection, calmed the people's concerns. Power, and immense, ill-gotten riches, were held in the grasp of a very few -- while many were poor, cheated of a day's pay for a day's work, and lived on acrid, despoiled land.
Its people stayed home and cursed, come voting day.
The second country, too, had been bought; its people, too, saw the poverty of their hardest workers, tasted acrid air and oily water, and saw the politicians and pundits shun all but the wealthy and a few token poor.
But its people fought back -- writing editorials, publishing alternative newspapers, talking on public television, and blogging on the Internet.
And come voting day all of them -- every one of them -- left their homes to vote.
The people, realizing they had suffered from a mass illusion of powerlessness, never again cursed the government they had themselves permitted all along -- but threw it out and elected true representatives.
Thus, your vote is absolute power incarnated -- or absolute power abdicated.


February 6, 2010, excerpt from The Parables of Reason (Chapter 2, "Assumption's Denial"), Copyright © 2010 by Frank H. Burton, Ph.D., Founder and Executive Director, The Circle of Reason, Inc. All rights reserved.

Dedicated in admonishment of the decades-long contamination of Vieques, Puerto Rico, by the U.S. Navy Bombing Test Range's unexploded munitions and toxic wastes including the heavy metals cadmium and mercury, Agent Orange, and enriched uranium; and of the U.S. government's ironic claim of "Sovereign Immunity" from lawsuits by cancer-afflicted Puerto Rican U.S. citizens who, by living in a U.S. "Territory," have been disenfranchised without voting rights -- with no voice in the government that controls them; and dedicated to the citizens of Vieques and Puerto Rico, who should demand either the right to reparation from their so-called "Sovereign" government, the right to vote as full citizens of that government, or the right to be an independent nation.