Fees To Thugs

The old story goes like this.  A young couple living in the city of Chicago decide to start a little family business.  Shortly after opening their doors a shady looking character walks in asking for the proprietor.  He then offers the couple “protection” in their business.  The couple look a little confused so the stranger clarifies.  “What I’m offering you, for a fee you see, is protection… from us”.  Now they get the picture.

These are thugs and that’s how they operate.  This tactic has been around for years and has now been  perfected to the point that people seem to accept it as good and normal.  Consider the union shop.  The person who goes to work in this shop has his “fees for protection” taken out of his paycheck every month; and it's tax deductible to boot.  If the poor worker doesn’t like what his union stands for and decides to stop paying his “fees”, then the union, backed by the power of the federal government, has him fired. Thugs you see.

On a larger scale we witnessed this year the attempt by these same sorts of thugs to oust the Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.  All the stops were removed it seemed because Walker was actually keeping a campaign promise to stop the fiscal bleeding in his state brought about by promised fees.  The thugs in the press slandered him.  The thugs in the legislature tied the hands of their law-making colleagues by denying a quorum by fleeing the state.  The thug workers filled the capital with rebellion, hatred and spite. In the end however the people of Wisconsin won this little battle.  We will see how that goes yet.

But there seems to be another strand of thuggery on the horizon.  We have all heard the story of Chick-fil-A’s run-in with Chicago’s mayor, the thug Rahm Emanuel.  It seems that the president of Chick-fil-A has announced that his company is not paying the fee for protection...  in so many words.  So, in typical thug fashion, the mayor has informed Chick-fil-A that it will not be receiving protection in Chicago… from Chicago.

The Arizona republic, a thug rag in its own right, ran a story Saturday, the 27th of July, informing the reader of the sort of fees that are expected for this sort of protection.  It's article begins: “Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos waded into a developing corporate culture war over gay marriage Friday with a $2.5 million donation to keep same-sex union legal in Washington… Bezos joins Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and companies like Starbucks Inc. and Nike Inc. with support to the campaign to uphold Washington’s law.“    Strangely missing in the story, for those who notice such things, is the typical 1-versus-99%-esque drivel we are accustomed to seeing when it concerns the uber-rich like Bezos and Gates, or how the low paid employees at these companies might have received raises instead, or the fact that these are very large corporations which are the nemesis of the modern day thugs--so we are led to believe anyway.  We didn’t hear any of this because they paid the fee… you see.  They are saints.

This all makes sense to us because we are tuned to it.  We are in fact living it out in the spiritual realm.  In this same fashion God offers us protection from himself.  But God is no thug.  For one, we rightly and justly deserve what God is offering us protection from… which is Himself.  Because we are the thugs in this story.  But more than this, he is offering to pay the “fee”, because it is a very expensive fee you see.  Not even Bill Gates could pay this fee.  His worldly wealth is much better squandered on worldliness.  But there again is the beauty of this fee.  Those who are oppressed by the likes of these sorts of thugs can still afford the fee, for it is paid by God Himself, and is free to all who realize their need for it and so ask for it.