The Ten-Meter Platform
If our goal is X, we need to aim for X+Y. If we fall short, we may still get close to X. This principle is just another way of saying we must lengthen our strides as we climb back up the slippery slope.
Many years ago I helped run a summer Scout camp in the Catskill Mountains. A few days before camp started the camp counselors, who were drawn from the older, higher ranking and more accomplished Scouts, arrived for several days of training. One of days always consisted of a team building/bonding activity. And one year we were fortunate and privileged to be able to arrange to take the counselors to West Point (The U.S. Military Academy) where the boys received scuba and riflery instruction. The counselors also had some free time to use the pool, including the diving platform and boards.
It was very interesting to see how some of the boys went straight to the top of the 10-meter platform. The more courageous (or reckless) ones didn’t hesitate to run right off the edge. Others were hesitant, and some had to steel their nerves as they looked down from way up there.
Many, if not most of the boys scurried to the other jump levels: a 5-meter platform, a 3-meter diving board and a 1-meter diving board. Not surprisingly, the boys who started at the bottom eventually worked their way up the heights, from unhesitatingly bouncing off the 1-meter board, to more hesitant jumps off the 3-meter, to very hesitant jumps off the 5-meter platform. Some of this group, when they reached the top of the 10-meter platform, simply but understandably chickened out and climbed back down. Others overcame their fear and took the plunge, emerging afterwards from the depths of the pool spluttering but victorious.
But what was notable was how the boys who had started with the 10-meter platform easily and unhesitatingly jumped or dived off the successively lower boards. Even those who hesitated at the top of the 10-meter platform behaved as if the 5, 3 and 1 were just no big deal.
What we adults observed and concluded was that the boys who initially set their sights at the most challenging and difficult goal, once achieved, found attainment of the less ambitious goals easy by comparison. Those who worked their way up from the bottom had a much tougher time of it.
The Left are very skilled at employing this principle. They know very well that a single-payer, Medicare-for-all, government-run healthcare system is a bridge too far, but if such a system represents the 10-meter platform, having for years set their sights on this their highest goal, look how readily they were able to achieve the intermediary goal represented by Obamacare. Similarly, the decibel level and sheer outrageousness of the Left’s rhetoric on so many other issues, amplified by the media megaphone, now make Bernie Sanders appear the moderate!
Today the Left is touting the Green New Deal. It is audacious beyond reason, no, beyond sanity, but they know that if they fall short, they will nevertheless hit intermediate targets that, figuratively, will ‘move the ball forward.’
Examples of their success are all around us. Look what’s happened to education, to law, to morality, to art, to just about every aspect of society. The setting of X+Y goals together with a relentless, ends-justify-the-means attitude has indeed fundamentally transformed our country.
We Traditionalists need to do the same. But once again, it’s difficult for us to adopt the same tactics as the Left. We’re too busy working hard, caring for our families, running Scout camps or coaching soccer teams, attending church functions, volunteering in our communities… to coalesce like the Leftist mob and “protest” and “resist”. But the thousand cuts we’re receiving are turning into a hemorrhage, and it takes an organized, determined force to stem the bleeding and heal.
We need 10-meter platforms of our own, and need to overcome our fear and be just as determined as the Left. We must change the meaning of “progressive” to what it should be, not how the Left is defining it. We’ve got to stop and reverse this ‘fundamental transformation’ before it really is too late.
We must speak up. We must speak out. We need to gather with others who feel as we do and become “community organizers” ourselves. Except our “community” is comprised of those who are extremely uncomfortable at organizing in this way. But it may be the only way we can lay the groundwork for a better path for our children and grandchildren than the one the Left has us on now.
