What if...

...the Battlestar Galactica story were true, and our ancestors really did come to Earth out of deep space?

It would mean growing up in a world where human beings are fundamentally different from every other species of life on the planet.

Darwin's theory, if it came to be known at all, would be a mere curiosity applicable only to lower life forms; humanity would stand apart from it as uniquely favored beings guided by a beneficent God to their earthly Eden out of interstellar darkness and chaos.

Ours would be a profoundly conservative society, part of a Divinely ordained universal order, presided over by an emperor descended from a legendary hero-ancestor, with each person conforming to his or her prescribed role. At best, it might come to resemble pre-1945 Japan; but more likely, I think, we'd be stuck in permanent feudalism, an endless Dark Age punctuated only by blights, plagues, floods, and other disasters, for faith must surely so completely displace doubt in such a world that science and technology, the engines of progress, would be severely retarded.

In the end, I think, a world of faith is a world enslaved. Doubt is the mother of knowledge and of liberty.

Class struggle

The thing is, it's not about how you talk, or what you drive, or what music you like, or what you wear, or any of a thousand other things that define "class" in our society.

It's not even about whether you work with your hands or with your mind.

It's about whether you live on the fruits of your own labor, or on the fruits of someone else's.

What we are seeing today, in Wisconsin and elsewhere, is the beginning of a titanic struggle between those who earn their own way in life and those who get a free ride. Over the past several decades, the social contract that formerly brought immense wealth to both classes has unraveled. The rich no longer feel invested in it; their money flits back and forth across borders in a heartbeat, and increasingly they no longer shoulder the responsibilities of citizens of their communities or countries. They are concerned with no one's interests but their own, and slowly but surely, the rest of us are waking up to the need to support and protect the interests we have in common against those who seek profit at our expense.

Workers of all countries, unite!