ArcaMax

Money and power are persistent. They grind toward the twin goals of more money and power. They are not distracted, and they can identify their enemies.

The people, which is the rest of us, are not so focused. We're not always sure who our enemies are, and we're limited in the kinds of hell we can raise. The key feature of a "popular uprising" is that it fails.

Or at least you hope it does because, if it succeeds, you usually get a dictator worse than the people you threw out of office, hunted down and killed.

The successful popular uprising gets you Stalin, Pol Pot and Donald Trump.

We the people are good at riots, is what we're good at, and the changing of one set of tyrants for another.

That's why the mostly rich men who led the American revolt were unique. They didn't intend to become kings. They intended to keep living in big houses, impregnating the slave women and playing around with French philosophy, but they didn't destroy one tyranny to replace it with another. It wasn't a perfect effort, but it was more than most successful rebels can manage.

The guy who shot the health care CEO in New York had a "manifesto" on him. This is standard. The manifesto is the only way you can tell the killers with an ideology from the regular killers. You shoot a guy they call "Tallboy" over a $50 crack purchase, you don't leave a manifesto.

But money and power are persistent. Before you can say "stock split," they'll get a new CEO, and the company will refuse to pay for your wife's cancer treatment, and you'll watch her die, and then you'll lose your house. It's called "insurance," and what it ensures is endless money for the people at the top.

If you go to the emergency room lately, don't be surprised if you spend four hours in a hallway until they find you a hospital room. Eight hours isn't out of the question. The insurance business has its thumb on health care's windpipe and profits get bigger the longer you stay out in the hallway.

And so some kid, all jacked up on some antique notion of "fairness," puts a couple in a CEO on a New York sidewalk. And inside everyone who works for a living, there is a little trickle, a choked-down giggle at the idea that someone shot a boss.

Murder is wrong, of course. It's only right if it's committed by a large company whose directors and officers and CEOs and CFOs are few but whose power is life and death. Individual murders are looked down on because their "manifesto" never says anything about increasing revenue.

If you have an idea to increase revenue and it kills tens of thousands of people, you are a successful CEO, and if anything is certain, it's that there won't be any dying people in your office when you show up for work. In your office, numbers dance with cash. The people die in hospitals that look out over an interstate, in some town where there may not even be a Starbucks, and people drink gas station coffee, like animals.

My father, a man not unfamiliar with games involving dice, used to say, "It's lonely at the top and crowded at the bottom."

And you want to say, no matter how much you choke it back, you want to say, "Kill a couple more of 'em. Maybe it'll scare the rest of 'em and they'll go easy on us."

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.