Thought Experiment

Einstein was always making thought experiments so I decided to try one myself. Imagine a grass roots protest of three million people on the Capitol mall. Thumbs down to this government! is the theme, and to dramatize the point, one guy brings a chain saw and cuts off his thumb and tosses it in the pool. Then somebody else wants his thumb cut off and then another, a rush of energy, and eventually there are so many severed thumbs in the pool that it spills over. What a protest! What a story! What video! What sound bites! What an avalanche of tweets! But nothing changes. Oh, there are expressions of concern and sympathy, committee meetings and proposed legislation, but nothing changes. No power shift. No income shift. No war stopped. No greed stymied. Same-o, same-o. So it occurred to me after this thought experiment, the Mother of All Grass Root Protests, that if this doesn't change things, nothing will. "You can't fix it. You can't make it go away." Forget the world and fix yourself.