On this day, 20 November 1816, the word ‘scab’, meaning ‘strikebreaker’, was used in print for the first time. One of the most important words in the working class vocabulary! On scabs, author Jack London famously wrote the following: “After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.“
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Pictured: strike supporters in New York, 1916 https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1269118939939920/?type=3
Thread by @SankofaBrown
I myself am currently reading This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed and it’s very enlightening. Brilliantly illuminates how the actual Civil Rights Movement was a melding of non-violent direct action with disciplined, armed self-defence.
Adopt the pace of nature. Her secret is patience.
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| — | Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol 10 (via philosophybits) |
The basic idea has been expressed through narrative a number of times. In one of Aesop’s fables The Fox and the Cat, the fox boasts of “hundreds of ways of escaping” while the cat has “only one”. When they hear the hounds approaching, the cat scampers up a tree while “the fox in his confusion was caught up by the hounds”. The fable ends with the moral, “Better one safe way than a hundred on which you cannot reckon”
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