Tired of Kings

 Earlier this week, the official U.S. White House account on X decided to mock the American people by posting a caption under a photo showing Trump and King Charles walking together: "Two Kings," it read. 

But if Trump is a king, he is a king of the sort Shelley described: "an old, mad, despised and dying king."

Meanwhile, the American people are going hungry to serve our king's whims. His war in Iran is squeezing farmers and workers by driving up the cost of every essential of life from fertilizer to gas to food. 

The Associated Press reports today that working people all over the world are affected by this sudden spike in the cost of living set off by Trump's wars. 

And they have had enough of it. They are taking to the streets in cities around this globe today, May 1, to protest the cost of living. 

What are they protesting? The fact that their wages won't keep pace with the spiraling cost of all the basic goods it takes to keep body and soul together.

They are protesting the conditions of life that Shelley again described: 

Tis to work and have such pay

As just keeps life from day to day

In your limbs, as in a cell

For the tyrants' use to dwell,

And driving up the cost of fertilizer and therefore of food is not the only way in which our mad king is starving the people. He is also proposing to slash the food stamps budget in order to pay for his monstrous wars. 

Meanwhile he goes on killing people without charge or trial by bombing civilian vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific. 

 

As Harry Alan Potamkin wrote of the first May Day—when the workers were gunned down in Chicago for asking for an eight-hour working day: 

sort out the men who had asked for an hour of sun,

call them "barbarians," you who have murdered,

bind them, imprison men of the people, 

send to the gallows, remember that May!

Yes, if Trump is a king, he is a king of anarchy and murder. 

And we are all tired of our murderous monarch. 

As Emerson wrote in the "Boston Hymn":

God said, I am tired of kings,


I suffer them no more;


Up to my ear the morning brings


The outrage of the poor.

Think ye I made this ball


A field of havoc and war,


Where tyrants great and tyrants small


Might harry the weak and poor?