They say to be careful using a powered grinder to sharpen a blade, as the grinder will make the blade very hot. If it gets hot enough, and turns a bluish color - or whatever hue depending on the metal being worked - then whoop, you screwed the pooch on that one. The blade has lost its temper, and will not be as strong as it once was, at least unless it is reforged or something like that.
Keeping this image in mind, it is remarkable to gaze upon the social and political climate today and then to watch the ruling classes continue on in their clueless, fumbling, and exploitative way, taking their incredible power for granted and doubling down on their destructive paths. The hubris!
They've taken too much, and continue to take too much, and stomp their flocks of livestock into the dirt, and now the resent is irreconcilable to the point in which mere difference - in opinion and perspective - takes the form of a deadly insult. What trust, what patience was left, has gone. Any prospect of collective coordination or problem-solving is gone too.
You see this in the proud defiance of people refusing to acknowledge the virus and either manage it collectively or manage their own person, refusing masks and the like. In their case to stand tall and to stand with dignity is to further spread death and economic destruction. For the wretched of the earth, who do the high and mighty scientists and epidemiologists think they are to tell them what to do and what to fear?
And on the other side of that coin is a defiance against continued exploitation, against landlords and monopolists and racist cops. Now every next slight can set off an explosion of public indignation and rebellion, as it should.
The virus rages, far and wide, and the attack dogs are loosed: the cops lose themselves in self-righteous frenzy and grind down the already downtrodden, and the landlords push for their eviction courts to juice the stone, and the body politic rages back in fury and it all gets hotter.
The fools! The temper won't be back until a lot of this simply burns down. By their own measures of success, the ruling elite, in their selfishness and narrowness and depravity, prevail only at building higher their own funeral pyres.
