| ▲ | wat10000 5 hours ago | |
It’s been boiling for a long time. Steinbeck wrote this nearly a century ago: "I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down — I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come to close and I'll pot you like a rabbit." "It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look — suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before your hung there will be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy." "That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill." "You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told them: "Clear those people out or it's your job." "Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a Board of Directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank." The driver said: "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were: "Make the land show profit or we'll close you up." "But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me." "I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't man at all. Maybe, like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders." | ||
| ▲ | potato3732842 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |
At the end of the day you have to actually shoot someone from time to time to keep everyone in line. It's way cheaper to not wrong people or to not walk up so close to that line than it is to secure the full stack and pay everyone what you'd need to pay them to compensate them for the risk of being the unlucky guy who gets scalped on livestream or whatever form sloppy retribution takes. | ||