November 2: Echolalia, Revenge Fantasies, Hundred Million Dollars

Echolalia is a mental disease which makes people immediately repeat things that well people around them say.  But Billy didn't really have it.  Rumfoord simply insisted, for his own comfort, that Billy had it.  Rumfoord was thinking in a military manner:  that an inconvenient person, one whose death he wished for very much, for practical reasons, was suffering from a repulsive disease.

Rumfoord is a charming individual.  (Read that statement with much sarcasm.)  Unfortunately, I think we all have Rumfoords in our lives.  People who will do anything to make themselves look good, even if it means wishing for the death of another human being.  Billy doesn't fit into Rumfoord's definition of the world as he knows it.  Therefore, Rumfoord does everything he can to make Billy not exist, including diagnosing Billy with an illness he doesn't actually have. 

I'd like to say that I am completely unlike Rumfoord, that I don't have a Rumfoord bone in my body.  However, I would be lying.  I am human, and so I experience emotions like jealousy and anger and envy.  I have been hurt by people, and I have spent some time cooking up revenge fantasies where those people have to endure humiliation and pain. 

For example, I once had a fantasy that I inherited or won a huge amount of money.  Hundreds of millions of dollars.  I dreamed of donating a portion of that money to an institution with a small caveat:  that institution had to fire a person who had done me wrong, to use the vernacular.  This little dream gave me a great deal of pleasure for a long time.

Of course, I have never been in possession of hundreds of millions of dollars, so I could never put my plan into action.  Nowadays, I like to believe that, even if I were lucky enough to become that wealthy, I still wouldn't follow through on my plan.  That I am a better person now.

Of course, there's only one way to find out:

Does anybody have a few hundred million dollars to give to Saint Marty?