Today is
International Mandela Day. Hold that
thought for a bit.
This week we
discover that 65% of people who voted for Britain to leave the European Union
either didn’t realize the vote was “serious” or, having come down from their
emotional state, want a second vote so they can say Stay. What’s with all the rage? I call
it being Drunk on Dudgeon. Just like
drunk on alcohol variety, if you are drunk on dudgeon, you are not capable of
making decisions in YOUR long-term, real best interest. You are so overwrought (drunk) on how badly
you’ve been treated by [someone, some group of people, some organization or
just The World in general], that you are supremely easy to manipulate in ways
that shoot you in the head [really harm YOU in a serious way] and give someone
else power. Or that give you a
short-term feeling of power at the
expense of actually having
power. That last is really important:
feeling something isn’t the same as having that something be actual reality.
In the
British case, a wide swath of English working-class folks, especially “white”
English, believed the nonsense of Boris Johnson and others who just flat out
lied with the intention of making a bid for Prime Minister/power themselves [the
manipulation] because they were angry about their declining economic prospects
and subsequent economic safety and power.
And those dingbats in Brussels were acting imperious and not
compromising or respectful. All the
details are irrelevant. People felt a
loss of power and turned to the short-term pumping up that rage gives you in
place of cold, strategic, implacable planning.
I know that when you “feel” powerless [it’s in quotes for a reason;
voting strategically gives you real power], rage is the easiest neural pathway
to take. I know. But it is also exactly – exactly – equivalent
to destroying your goals and dreams. Why
wait for your Nemesis to do it? Do it to
yourself.
Aristotle
said that you can be angry – but make sure that you are angry at the right
time, in the right way, with the right person.
The Brexit voters who were manipulated by (really, really
easily-checked) lies were not Done To By The Man. They did it to themselves, by letting
themselves get Drunk on Dudgeon.
In the Star
Trek universe, a wonderful quote by an actual human whose name I’ve forgotten
has been mis-attributed to the Klingons. Revenge is a dish best served cold. That means: don’t get Drunk on Dudgeon! Think, cold and calm and analytical. Do ONLY what actually advances your long-term
agenda, not your short-term emotions.
This is a
universal human problem. Every culture
on every continent, of every skin color and sex has this same problem because
it happens in the human brain.
In the USA
right now, groups of people are squaring off with each other, all Drunk on
Dudgeon. Socially conservative white
working class Americans, along with quite a few black working class folks, have
settled on racist demagogue Donald Trump as the “alcohol” to get drunk on. Some Black Lives Matter activists have
responded to a string on highly-publicized police killings of black men and
women to use hateful rhetoric against all police officers, demonizing all white
cops as killer racists. It is completely
predictable that demonizing rhetoric will resonate in a mentally-unhinged black
military veteran (or two) who will get Drunk on Dudgeon in their turn and
become mass killers of well-intentioned, innocent police officers. There are legitimate grievances all around,
as President Obama has so eloquently reminded us.
He also
reminds us, so beautifully, and without using my exact verbiage, that becoming
Drunk on Dudgeon instead of being strategic does not serve the long-term best interests
of any genuinely harmed parties. Unstrategic hate and rage only burns the world down. It has never, in all ten thousand years of human civilization, led to justice.
In my book, Take Back Your Lost Heart, I analyzed
why the Montgomery Bus Boycott was so successful. Remember: successful. The keys were going after the strategic issue
and targeting the bus company’s revenues; being strategic and keeping tempers
cold [remember the Klingons] so that the boycott had a lot of allies among
business owners, among progressive and humanistic white civilians and even
among some police. Polarizing the city exclusively
along color lines didn’t happen. A significant percentage of the cars picking
up non-bus-riding black folks needing to get to work were white-driven. Good was battling Evil all right, but the
organizers were not stupid enough to make every white person in town their enemy
by labeling them as such. THAT, my
friends, is why they won.
Contrast
that with screaming and taking over the podium so that the thousands of people
of all colors who came to hear a candidate talk can’t do so…. A super-leftist
candidate at that. Sound strategic to
you?
Giving up
Drunk on Dudgeon and getting very, very cool always wins. Always.
Nelson Mandela, whose birthday we celebrate today, had a cold and
analytical soul. He could take his
righteous rage and stop it dead, then channel it into cold, analytical
thinking. When things were at their
worst, there was little he could do but endure. His last 12 years in prison,
though, he played the white power structure like a Stradivarius violin. He never lumped his jailers (mostly
working-class, politically-powerless guys) in the same bag as the rich pukes
who ran the country. His narrow-thinking, Drunk on Dudgeon fellow prisoners
were appalled, and criticized him as a “collaborator” but he was right and they
were stupid. The jailers (cops), as bad
as some of them were, were just products of the same crazy system as the
thousands of black men and women killed by the security services or local
cops. And some of them were decent guys
stuck in a bad situation.
So, this
Mandela Day, let’s ALL start thinking like Madiba. Strategic.
Cool. Calculating. And when someone of any color, of any sex, on
any issue tries to play us like a Strad, manipulating our emotions, let’s stop,
take a deep breath and think about the bigger picture, the long-term real goals
and really, clearly think it all through, as both President Obama and Mr.
Nelson Mandela remind us to. If Madiba
could take down apartheid with cool, analytical, strategic thinking, why on
earth are we using stupid confrontational tactics (on all sides) and expecting
to win?
Giving up
Drunk on Dudgeon is hard. It’s hard to
give up the easy path. But we’re not in
this to go down the stupid, easy path.
We can represent the finest
behavior humanity is capable of – and the smartest. Like the end of apartheid, like the bus
boycott, we good people of this country and this world will win, but only if we
are cool, analytical, strategic. The
best way to honor Nelson Mandela today, and every day, is to emulate his smarts,
his courage and his violin-playing. He
won. When the urge to spew
self-righteous anger and hate starts getting too much to hold back, remember –
HE WON.
We will,
too. I have faith.
