098. If I fight battles, but am not possessed by a campaign, I'm ranting, not helping. No vision of winning, no hope
So the end of this year there'll be on hunger strike. Tomorrow there will be a demonstration at BP. Six months from now there will be attempts of legislation in the halls of Congress....
To look at this from a different angle - so my daughter's had a temperature of 106 for five days; so tonight I'll try some different medicine; tomorrow I'll call the doctor; the next they'll call a nurse, the following day, oh, maybe I'll drive my daughter to the emergency room, except she probably won't still be alive. In this second case maybe some of the absurdity is apparent.
In situations that we understand are personal to us, of emergency, we don't do tactics. We don't do things. We do a plan. We do a vision. Yes, it might be a situation we've never been in before, but we still hold ourselves to the best possible plan, the best comprehensive vision, as inadequate as it might be, and then we select our tactics within that plan, within that vision, and we adjust, adjust, but always within a plan, a failure is not an option plan.
So, we are going to have the Rio conference to avert environmental Armageddon. I mean that's what we did. That's what we had. An attempt. An action. An event. Earlier, we had an attempt at Graham Lieberman legislation a couple of years ago.
If we treated our sick children this way they wouldn't survive. That would be so obvious to us.
But when we are being 'nice people,' being activists and failure is an option, well, failure IS an option! Pressure is off! I mean, it isn't like anyone is going to die if we f*ck up! Oh. Never mind.
But when failure is not an option, when we are living out of the family emergency response, what we do as activists is the height of absurdity, and we see it instantly, in ourselves, in others. Right? I don't want to do tactics, actions like - take my daughter the hospital, give her a different medicine, get her a nurse.... I want to get her well!!!!! And by God, I will!
Well everything backs up to that, and when that part of the nervous system is involved, it doesn't let us make this deadly mistake of, oh, let's do tactics. Huh? The 'family emergency response circuits' catches such let's-do-tactics insanity, automatically. And when we're not operating out of the family emergency response, our nervous system will let us go on forever killing the time of the clients that we are purporting to want to serve and save.
The non-family emergency response doesn't differentiate between isolated tactics that go on and fail for decades, and tactics that are part of a vision. Different circuits friends. Everything depends upon operating out of the heart, the family emergency response. It automatically catches this stuff. And with the head and the flesh in charge it never gets caught. We feel good about ourselves, we overprivileged people, we collect our paychecks, we collect your kudos, and the Grim Reaper collects our clients.
How much longer will you live, and kill by, failure-is-an-option?
