Power

By Victor M Fontane

Power is the ability to direct or influence the behavior of another person or the course of events. When Christopher Columbus first came into contact with the natives in America, it was with the Arawak people in the Bahamas and in his diary he wrote: “They voluntarily gave us everything they owned, they did not carry weapons, and they do not know them because I showed them a sword, they caught it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They will make good slaves, he said. With fifty men we could subdue them all and make them do what we want. That was a derivative of the oppressive European political and religious structures of the Renaissance. Kings and Priests with absolute power rolling the masses who own nothing. And that was the mentality of the men who discovered America.

We'll probably come back to that again.