In the myth I liked to enact as a kid, Robin Hood was a witty swashbuckler who didn’t have to help poor people and could have enjoyed the patronage of the evil king and his even more evil henchman the Sheriff of Nottingham, but Robin felt it was shamefully wrong that so few people should own almost everything while everybody else was starving to death.
The final straw for my Robin Hood came when the king and his amoral cohorts raised taxes even higher on people already literally dying under debt. Robin Hood said, “Enough already,” and started waylaying rich people traveling through Sherwood Forest and taking their money and jewels to buy food to give to the poor. But Robin didn’t just take their money. He brought them to a feast in the forest where he was taking care of a bunch of hungry people, and he introduced the rich people to the poor people so the rich people would learn that poor people were exactly the same as rich people except for one thing: they weren’t the children of rich people.
When I would enact my Robin Hood dramas with my friends, I usually played the part of Robin Hood, and my friends would play the parts of Friar Tuck, Little John, and Will Scarlett, and they would all best me at combat. Even so, they liked having me lead them in our skirmishes with the Sheriff of Nottingham because I knew how the story went and they weren’t sure what was supposed to happen next.
We even had little leather pouches full of rocks (money) we took from the rich, usually invisible but we knew they were there, and gave to the poor, also usually invisible but easily imagined from seeing the Errol Flynn movie version of Robin Hood several times.
These enactments always made us happy. And I think that was because we knew instinctively that sharing was the way to go. Indeed, I think it was in our bones, our genes, in the evolution of our species to share in order to survive. Nobody should be rich at the expense of other people, especially when there’s plenty of food and money for everybody.
Little did we know we were socialists and the king and his lords were capitalists, but that’s the story we were playing out, creating a world of sharing and equity.
Now the actual ruler of America and his greedy henchmen have raised taxes on the already desperately poor, taken away medical care for tens of millions of people, and are creating a society resembling the England of Robin Hood’s time.
This time, however, the rulers have made sure guys with bows and arrows won’t stand a chance against vast numbers of soldiers armed with powerful weapons. There is no fun way to bring about a just and equitable society because, quite frankly, we waited too long to do anything about these greedy guys taking over all the branches of our government.
So what do we do? Elect people who want to take from the rich and give to the poor, assuming the rich ever let us have a fair election again.
fin
Everybody Has To Breathe from Todd’s CD Hip Salon
