I don't want you to make the mistake about me that I think that a lot of people have made, which is to think that I am directly powerful. I am not directly powerful, nor am I trying to have the kind of power that someone like the President of the United States has, nor do I want to wield that kind of power later in my life.
I am sometimes influential. However, when it seems as if I have had a direct and positive effect on the behavior of powerful people, that's because those people, at that time, are being reasonable, because I have made a good argument, and because they have decided to change what they were doing. It's not because I made them do anything. Power means that you can make people do things; influence means that sometimes you can persuade people. It's usually better when I am also being reasonable in the way that I'm talking or writing; sometimes I am so angry or otherwise upset that I can't sound respectful and I am fortunate at those times when the people to whom I'm speaking or writing understand that I'm too upset to be in control of everything that I'm saying and also that I have a good reason to be upset.
If it seems as if I am used to addressing powerful people on a regular basis, I have to tell you that I continue to be unable to believe that my life is the way that it is more often than you might think. It's just that there was no time to do anything but fight right away, as soon as all the bad things started happening in 2010. It seemed to me that someone had to say "These are things that cannot happen or the entire world will suffer for it," and that it didn't matter if I lost, because the issues were so important. I never thought that I was more powerful than all of the powerful people and organizations that have been involved in what has happened; I just knew that I could not acquiesce.
Copyright L. Kochman, September 16, 2015 @ 5:31 p.m.
