PERHAPS

I love this word. It says so much without really saying anything. You can just utter perhaps and then you are saying, I might do that, whatever it is.

In reality you may not be doing a darn thing or even want to. But if you are like me you are too spineless to admit it, so saying perhaps just works so much easier.

The real upside to this word is that there are also times when you can honestly mean it or want it to be true. I find that to be a wonderfully versatile option from my point of view.

So you can be telling the truth or you can be lying, but perhaps is still the optimum response and I love it! Yep, there is nothing better than being able to inspire hope and if you are really lucking end up turning some desperate employee into a working for practically free. All for the “perhaps” of a promise of a raise or some other fabulous illusion. Then later you say, “darn, I’m so sorry, but it just isn’t going to happen.”

You see that is my main bone of contention with issues like slavery. Outside of the obvious moral issues, let’s be honest, nobody is going to be impressed when you have labor that isn’t there by choice. And look what happened in the long run? We had a war, the slaves got set free and the whole system went into the crapper on the surface.

What did we replace it with? To be honest it was a clever version of perhaps. True it didn’t improve the freed slaves very much. Perhaps, ah there is that word again, we weren’t quite as brutal as the Romans in terms of slaves, but we weren’t sweethearts either.

The big problem with the perhaps we came up with after the whole failure of slavery was that eventually it sort of went bust too. See the main value to perhaps options is that when they go bust you can’t tell the person in any way. That is if you want to prevent them getting pissed off.

Which is where we really blew it. We gave people freedom in a technical sense, but didn’t give them any real or credible perhaps to believe in. What we succeed in doing is build plenty of resentments and in the end all the social glue we tried to use to fix the situation hasn’t worked.

I say it is time for a really new type of perhaps. One that we can believe in and give us back some of the hope that all the politicians and greedy corporations took away from us. Yeah I said politicians. I am said to say there are simply way too many of my species out there that haven’t developed their perhaps skills.

But I imagine life will go on. People will continue to be abused and complain about it. Politicians will ride the back of social causes in hopes of looking like they care for vote time. Then later they will go off to some closet somewhere to hide while they figure the best way to make it look like really are doing something. Perhaps it will change. Probably about the same time that I win the lottery.