A bit of humor
I found this funny today as I read. (…I suppose it is as much funny as it isn’t funny in a way also.)
From Disgrace Abounding, Ch. 1, (by Douglas Reed):
"So you know just what I am against. What I am, what I am for: these are more difficult to state. I only knew one other man in my case, and he was the hero of an enthralling human drama that I found in a volume of German statistics, which are far stranger than truth. In the section devoted to the number of German strikes and lock-outs in a certain year (yes, that was before Hitler) I found, in a column headed ‘Number of strikers’, the numeral ‘1′, and in the next column, headed ‘Working days lost’, the figure ‘187′, and in the column headed ‘Result’, the words ‘No agreement’.
I scarcely dared believe my eyes when I found ‘1′. Men had sought for centuries the secret of making gold, the Saragossa Sea, the stone of wisdom, the sunken city, and a cure for baldness, and had failed. I had found something rarer than them all - The One Man Strike. Somewhere in Germany a working man had struck, and struck for more than half a year. Spurning all inducements, braving all threats, picketing the works to keep himselffrom blacklegging, daily growing thinner and colder and hungrier, he had struck and struck and struck, and at the year’s end he was still striking and ‘No agreement’ had been reached.
A stupendous, a Homeric, an immortal conflict! To my last day I shall regret that Hitler then came to power, abolished strikes, and prevented me from reading the next instalment of that enthralling tale in the next volume of statistics. But I looked back through earlier volumes, for previous years, and, believe it or not, ‘1′ was always there. ‘1′ had struck, for longer or shorter periods, for several years. He was unconquerable. Every year he was there, striking, striking, striking.
A kindred spirit. The One Man Striker, the incorrigible salesresister, the professional rebel, the champion of a lost cause."
