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| From the United Kingdom to the United States, activists fighting for myriad causes carry on the tradition of Robin Hood. (photo: Oxfam International) |
18 February 12
For hundreds of years, he's fought tax injustice, tyranny, and the seizure of the commons. Why we still need him today.
"Man has an insatiable longing for justice. In his soul he rebels
against a social order which denies it to him and whatever the world he
lives in, he accuses either that social order or the entire material
universe of injustice ... And in addition he carries within himself the
wish to have what he cannot have - if only in the form of a fairy tale."-- Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (1981)
n
the late 1950s, a handful of peaceniks protested mandatory ROTC on a
major U.S. university campus by carrying signs and wearing green
buttons. Back when The Adventures of Robin Hood was a giant hit on
television, most everybody knew that green was Robin Hood's color and
that Robin could not side with the king's soldiers or future soldiers of
any empire. Five decades later, the lead protagonist of a cult favorite
American cable show, Leverage, announces at the beginning of each
episode: "The rich and the powerful take what they want; we steal it
back for you."
It's a fitting motto for heroes of the 21st century.
Admittedly, resistance to injustice has not as yet returned to the level
of the apprentices and craftsmen in Edinburgh, Scotland, who in 1561
chose to come together "efter the auld wikid maner of Robene Hude": they
elected a leader as "Lord of Inobedience" and stormed past the
magistrates, through the city gates, up to Castle Hill where they
displayed their unwillingness to accept current work-and-wage
conditions. But as a global society, we are clearly still thinking about
the need for Robin Hood. READ MORE
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