It's almost as if they've never studied business or marketing... oh, hang on...
Yeah, well it's probably not such a surprise that the concept of "opinion leaders" might not figure highly in their thinking when they treat a day out marshalling as an opportunity to work out their feelings of frustrated anger towards those people who have power over them in their day to day lives and jobs, the kind of people who have some power in an organisation and even if they don't make a massive deal out of it, those with the misfortune to be subject to that power know very well that it doesn't matter what the issue is, once there is an issue, that power will be exercised even to the extent of causing people real harm in their lives in order that the 'superior' is acknowledged as right, often without any reference to whether that opinion actually bears any semblance of veracity whatsoever and furthermore in the unspoken knowledge that, should said opinion be proved erroneous at some point, then ownership of it will become at least a moot point and may in fact migrate towards another, possibly the very hypothetical marshal we are examining.
The trouble with these feelings is that when they exist for a long time they cannot easily be examined, or even experienced consciously, by their owners, because to do so is to have to consider and admit to oneself some really fundamental truths which once admitted cannot be taken back and also require action or else the consequences of inaction will be so bad that they will literally threaten life and sanity:
"Why is my life so shit? I had dreams. Why am I having to put up with cocks who know nothing about leadership, organisation, or responsibility but everything about sliming out from under scrutiny whenever anything goes wrong and by dint of that alone have managed to keep their power and/or maintain the structure of that power so long that their position and that of their ilk is unassailable so they get to big up their chests on a daily basis at my expense? Why do they tell kids that if you work hard you can do, if not anything you want, then at least make the most of whatever you can do and enjoy the just rewards from doing it diligently, when the truth is that, unless you are extremely lucky, the majority of the wealth, status, wellbeing, joy, goodwill, respect, and power that is generated from whatever you do as a job will be enjoyed by others, the majority of whom have done nothing more, and often considerably less, than you to deserve it...
[and breath]
...and that your work will take up so much of your time, even when you are not there, in terms of dictating where you can go, what you can do, with whom you can associate, what you can look like, even what beliefs you can be known to hold, that anything you may choose to do outside work, in the hope of generating a higher percentage of all that good stuff for yourself and maybe a couple/few close associates, will be very much a secondary activity, always losing out to that which ought to be what you do in order to pay for your chosen life but which very much becomes the life you must continue doing it to pay for, in some horrible soul consuming serpent swallowing its own tail kind of way...?
[and relax]
Why is it that for the majority of us, opting out of even a little bit of the rat race, but enough for it to be worthwhile, enough that we will gain any significant time and energy which could be put to better use living how we would like, will result in losing almost all of the meagre benefits being part of the crowd brings? Can I make it on my own, ostracised from normal society? Can I actually cope with the people who have been ostracised for who knows what, since they will become the pool from which I get to select my future associates?
[cue surreal circular-paradoxical bit]
Why don't I have the understanding of my feelings and, even when I do to an extent, the practice using the vocabulary necessary to understand them better, to have an internal dialogue, let alone discuss them with somebody else, so that I can make informed choices about the things I find myself doing just because I feel like this, without knowing why i do them, rather than being filled with this dark emptiness, as if inside me there was an organ with a wound on its outside membrane which has scabbed over but never healed, and come apart and scabbed again, and again, so that the wound is barely covered by the flaky insubstantial coping mechanisms I have to avoid these very thoughts and when I lift the scab just a fraction, it's not a wound but somehow a bottomless pit with an inchoate howl of anguish still echoing around inside it from when it was first ignored and suppressed, subjugated to the requirements of this 'life' which I never chose, which if I'd been given the facts beforehand I would never have chosen, all those years ago? A howl which in reality takes the place of pretty much everything I have just written... and what about those coping mechanisms...?
[and now, the end is near... and so I face the... *gulp*]
Oh shit, I'm a bully. I'm just like those arseholes I hate for doing it to me... I go around treating people like dirt because I can get away with it and all to stop myself from thinking about that dark pit. I feel important and worthy of respect when I make someone else feel inconsequential, disrespected, insulted, frustrated for no reason at all never mind a good one... I've got to change. I hate people like that. Like me. I've got to change. But... but... how? I'll have to get out from under those people who do it to me. But there are so many of them. Even if I can get out from under this lot, there will be more wherever I go. I'll have to opt out of pretty much the entire rat race... I daren't. The truth is as I've suspected for so long but couldn't even come close to thinking about, I'm a coward. I would rather eat shit morning noon and night than risk losing what little sense of security I feel from being similar enough to everybody else that I can call myself 'successful'... oh god, i'm despicable...
"Oi you! Bravo Two Zero in the Osprey... get over here! What... are you questioning my professional judgement? Getting a free day playing in exchange for marshalling makes me a professional, you know!? You know when it says Pro Airsoft Guns on websites? That's me that is: a professional and you'd better remember it. What I say goes! Go on, get back in, but don't let me see you doing that again, or there'll be trouble!"
Still, as I say, opinion leaders... Unfortunately for those who have grown up with the above massive waffle being the norm, indeed to one extent or another the only way to advance from a position at the periphery of the power pertaining to whatever group we may seek to belong to, closer to the warming centre of concentrated bum licking, the times they are a changing. Not the modus operandi of course, but increasingly it is very difficult to spot opinion leaders by sight, to understand what direction leads toward the centre of the nearest nexus of bum lickery...
But hey, what do I know? I'm just a nutter who swallowed a dictionary waffling on an obscure forum, right?
:wacko:
Right?
