Redefining Radical

 WHEN I TURNED SIXTY I decided to retire and go back to school, for free at my age. I enrolled in two journalism courses which didn't go well. One was frankly a bit too easy and the other was taught by an old professor who preferred talking about his personal achievements rather than the course material. Between him and Hillary Clinton, by the summer of 2015 one of them had visited one hundred and eleven countries, and the other one hundred and twelve, I  forget which. To him it really mattered. But really, who cares? Being in the same room with two hundred eighteen year olds was freaky enough, freakier because had laptops except me. One day I approached the old professor while wearing my favorite "rolling Stones" T shirt, which I think he didn't like and probably thought immature for a person my age, and asked him whether he knew anything about journalist Chris Hedges. He did, he said, but he didn't sound like he liked Christ,  damning him whit faint praise, describing him as "different". Different indeed, if "different" means super intelligent, well educated, and brutally honest. Chris Hedges I describe as "great". If nearly everything you say is radical and true, you aren't so much radical, as honest. If by chance you are not familiar with Chris hedges, and are not yet fully convinced that we urgently need in the United States a full fledged revolution to overthrow the existing power structure and replace it with actual democracy, if you read Hedges, you will be. Maybe his best book is "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."  Everyone should at least know a few basic facts about America, and be horrified by them. First, a tiny fraction of the American people, less than one hundredth of one percent , own and control most of the nations' wealth. The numbers are really staggering, like, forty percent of the wealth in the hands of one percent of the population. Even worse, the world's eight richest people are wealthier than the bottom fifty percent of the world's population, nearly four billion people. Wealth and power in American are synonymous. Corporate capitalism and democracy do not mix, its that simple. With a few big corporations with billionaire owners owning most of the wealth and having nearly all the political power, like we have in America, is not democracy, its plutocratic oligarchy. What we need in America is fundamental, revolutionary structure change, but most people don't realize it, having been brainwashed by their corporate masters to embrace the corporate status quo. Anyone of modest or average means who actually believes that he or she has the same amount of political power as a billionaire is stark raving crazy, or, an idiot, or simply uninformed and uneducated. I  do not object to people having more money than I do, but I object strenuously to their having more political power than I because of their money, and everyone who really believes in democracy should feel the same way. Maybe some fine day enough of us will understand the situation, and get mad enough about it to actually do something about it.