My dad bought and worked a small farm in rural western Pennsylvania in the last years before he died. He was a friendly guy, and the local farmers would come help him when he was having trouble with the Farm-All or whatever.

They often would say mysterious things in the context of the phrase “Come the revolution…” Things like, “Come the revolution, we won’t have to worry about taxes anymore…” Eventually my dad got up the courage to ask what they meant, and found out it basically meant (I’m paraphrasing here): “When those damn liberal gay coloreds come to take our guns, we’ll rise up.”

My dad and I had a good laugh at that, mixed with sadness. Funny because, I mean, come on– cuckoo! Sad because they were so adamant that their world view was the right one, and so was their response.

I told the story to my wife, and we’ve adopted the phrase, but in different contexts. It’s basically our generic phrase to cover any number of doomsday scenarios: global warming, peak oil, economic collapse. “Come the revolution, we’ll be simply NOSTALGIC for these days when the worst we had to deal with was all these poopy diapers.”

But I had a suddenly serious conversation recently with someone who had just survived a major layoff at his company. About “the revolution”. This guy is one of the most down to earth folks I’ve met recently. He talks like he’s salt of the earth, but underneath he’s very well-read on history.

“Hey chief,” I said to him, “anything exciting happen recently?” He said exciting was one word for it, then proceeded to fill me in on the layoffs. I commiserated, and we joked about how what they ultimately want is just a CEO to hold press conferences, and a CFO to collect the money.

I know this guy isn’t a flaming progressive like me, he’s more an independent, used to like McCain for prez until recently, etc., so I usually tiptoe around any politics. But this day I decided to be brave and said, “I just wonder what’s going to become of the middle-class. I mean, where’s our country heading?” He grunted. I pressed him. “What do you think?”

He shook his head, “You don’t wanna know what I think.” “C’mon.” “It’s not pretty.” “Try me.”

He proceeded to explain to me that “Basically, all levels of our society and government, from the prez on down, is controlled by business.” I agreed. “And what they want is to make as much money as they can. And you and me and anyone like us that’s making above minimum wage is getting in the way of that.” Uh-huh, go on.

“So what they’re doing is more and more people are, I dunno, shaken out of the middle class into a bigger and bigger pool of poor people. You end up with a few very rich people, and a big big pile of poor people.” OMG, is he going where I think he’s going?

“Now if you read your history,” I told him I’m a huge fan of history, “ok, well, you know when that kind of situation happened in France and Russia and other places in the last couple hundred years, what happened?” I was silent, but he could tell I was already there.

“That’s right. Revolution. They may talk all fancy about it, like it’s about liberty and all that, and that may be partly true. But underneath it’s all about the little guy getting screwed economically.”

“See?” He smiled. “Told ya you didn’t wanna know.” I smiled back. It was nothing I hadn’t thought or read about, but man was it weird coming from him.

I hope we learn from history before it comes to that.