Who Are the Fools?

Who Are the Fools?

by Michael Espinoza



Once upon a time there was a land called Wise Land.

It was called Wise Land because everyone who ran things in it were fools.

The mayor was a fool.  He passed laws requiring people to spend imaginary money.

The doctor was a fool.  He used his tools to carve people's bodies into shapes they were never meant to be.

The schoolmaster was a fool.  He taught his students that "wise" meant foolish and "foolish" meant wise.

The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker--all fools.

So of course the land was called Wise Land, because nothing made sense.

The only people in Wise Land who were not fools--the philosophers, the logicians, the mathematicians, the thinkers--were in jail.  Their sentence for not being fools was life imprisonment.

The non-fools put their heads together to come up with a means of escape.  They reasoned that, since they were the most intelligent people in Wise Land, they could escape prison easily.

They came up with ever so many plans of escape...and not a single one worked.

They tried digging through the ground, but instead of a hole, they made a pile.  The more they dug, the higher the pile would become.

They tried sawing through the bars, but the bars only became thicker.  The more they sawed, the thicker the bars became.

They tried tricking the fools keeping them there--but the fools were too foolish for the tricks to work.

Try though they might, the thinkers in jail failed to come up with a plan of escape from their prison cells that would work, because every plan required the use of logic, and nothing in Wise Land would cooperate with their logic.

They could not think of a plan that would take the nonsense of Wise Land into account, because none of it was logical--and so they stayed in jail for the rest of their lives.



Who were the real fools?