Champion sound.
"Patience works with time. In time, everything you have experienced, even the most difficult moments, can become a source of enrichment and joy. In fact, nothing happens without a reason; there is meaning in everything, but it is up to you to find it. While you are experiencing suffering of any kind, do not allow your mind to remain focused on it, tied up with it! Project it into the future, and tell yourself that soon you will have forgotten what is now hurting you so badly, or if it is impossible to forget it you will see it in a different light. When we know how much our inner states can alter over time, we can bear so much more!" -Omram Aivanhov |
The lesson taken from 2011 may indeed be that revolutions need leaders, ones like the man the world lost last week. The digital era means that protestors can amass quickly, and singular events -- a troop carrier careening through a square, or a single act of police brutality in Oakland -- can galvanize a population and fill the streets.
But the slow nature of building revolutions in the analog era -- the very acts of circulating of Havel's plays and essays through Prague bars and theaters, or disseminating Khomeini's tapes through Tehran -- not only galvanized the public, but also built the stature of those who could negotiate with the regime, or who could come to lead in its place.
I've come to think that the street will very rarely succeed without icons, like Vaclav Havel, who can speak with legitimacy, and sit down with the ruling regime to negotiate, with both sides knowing that full weight of the street is behind him or her.
The street needs leaders, or cohesive coalitions of leaders, who can tell the movement when to lie low, like Mandela, and when to rise up, and who can demand more in the face of the regime's tepid offerings.
