﻿Instead of originating from an ape (I now know) we came from a cat. Just take a look at a cat’s mitt and let your eye linger on the way he swings a punch at you. Need I say more? And neither one or the other has learned much since. (Sense.)
(Note, I do admit some learning in both!)
Those INTOLERANT that DESPAIR of the INTELLIGENCE of their NEIGHBORS are SICK, also—”MORONS.” ala mode. But they KNOW it NOT.
They THINK they’re RIGHT (only THINK—) They KNOW it NOT. (Intolerance?— )
Yet we cannot accuse them of knowsiness, for verily learning, and the learnt, have not as yet punched so much as a hole in the pelt of knowledge.
(Last clause “accounts” for schools like the Work People’s College.)
They may have “thought” that the hide of knowledge reposed in theri lap; that the stuff was all off with wisdom but, alass: so far, knowledge hasn’t lost a single drop of blood—the boys have been inhaling sweat and hailing it victory—and, like morons true, puffing out their pining bellies and crating on their wonderful corpulence—the fatness of their head. That’s why we need schools! That’s why we need the I. W. W.—primarily, to raise wages but ultimately to obtain a “strangle-holt” on knowledge, attain and introduce that well advertised civilization long overdue.
I ain’t getting hysterical, am I, editor?
(Not a bit of it, T-Bone; not a bit of it You are handing them out the right sort of punch, and if it wallops them into the Work Peoples College next year so much the better. They have neglected our college long enough!—Ed.)
We may write and write—what’s that!
Linoleum, the great Roman, wrote 4,000 books—and said things we don’t know how to say with leadpencils. Speakers may pour out their very souls, in torrents of word—huh! It amounts to the same as pumping a coal barge dry into the ocean; so many words were laid before—it’s like a gentle shower on a parched desert, sadly in need of it—but unquenched and a desert still.
Say, where in hell is that big advance we are supposed to have made? My point is this: Knowledge is untouched—a virgin of purest complexion—and to say we have participated in the falling of that giant of the forest is a bare-faced lie with whiskers; to say we have cut a notch into it, shows we ain’t loggers—or the tree would be down! Why lie about it? The tree of knowledge is untouched; I claim we haven’t seen the tree; never “got a whiff’ of its fragrant presence—to say nothing about basking about in its grateful shade.
Big thing, Joe—big tree!
Show me bad conditions and I’ll show you ignorance.
(Did you get me?)
Bad conditions, when they exist—and they do exist—in factories and industrial pens, “are due mainly to ignorance.” That’s right big boy, forty different ways—but we don’t call it ignorance: we calls it greed, so we do—greed of the boss and his system: “It’s all one and the same things: that makes it ignorance, pure and simple, mainly!
And when bad conditions exist, it leaves no room for us to exist—and they do exist (the bad conditions) so, we don’t. We’ve quit—we’ve quit existing. We’re nothing but a—but a—fond memory.
But we’re a memory that won’t stay ‘laid.’
A ghost that won’t stay “put.”