Wow … my friends. Incredible. Absolutely. Wow … my friends … please. My friends ….
My friends: they said that we couldn’t do it.
They sat there, hands behind their heads, feet on the desk, cigar chomped in their teeth and they told us, point-blank, with a straight face, that it could not be done by us.
And yet it did get done; and we were the ones that did it.
Yes, getting it done took some doing. Some real effort and sacrifice. Some toil and expense, not to mention more intellect than most things needing to get done tend to demand.
But any cool and calm observer would be willfully misleading to stand before it and say that it was not done. For in actual fact it was done. Done conclusively; done wholeheartedly and determinately. Done, in a word, now and for the foreseeable future.
Not only was it done, but it was done by the very people who we were told could never in any circumstance get it done: us. You, me, each other.
Look at them. Now take a look at yourselves. The outcome is clear. The difference is undeniable. We are right. They, who again said that it could not be done by us, are wrong.
Yes … that’s right … please … wow.
My friends, I urge calm on this point. In the great conflicts of our species there are those who are right and those who are not. It would be nice if everyone was right and no one ever was wrong. But think of what kind of world that would bring us: a chaotic and confused one. This person’s rightness will almost certainly come into conflict with that person’s rightness, leading to only God knows what outcome.
No, my friends, our present reality is the best one: with someone on top and someone else below. It is to our great merit that we are on the top.
But with our desired position comes an expected level of dignity in celebrating it. We must not be excessive in rudeness to those who are wrong. Despite their hurtful comments on the things that they were certain could not have been done, especially by us.
We must not hold them too harshly in their now unimpeachable misjudgments. We must not go out of our way to accost them on the street with forceful but puckish denunciations of their foolishness or confident exaltations of our wisdom and daring.
We must not delight ourselves too much at their uneasiness in our presence, or in their sorrow at seeing our joy. If we are so tempted to laugh at the sight of them hunched in shameful solitude over a greasy basket of Long John Silver’s, or whatever food with which they sate their sadness, that we simply cannot suppress it, we must do well to say that it is not them that provokes our laughter, but something that we remembered from the past, something we remembered seeing years ago on Space Ghost Coast to Coast. Or Caroline in the City.
Wow … beautiful … stupendous.
Now, my friends, don’t be misled. While many of those who have turned out to have been wrong will be mostly sad, aggrieved, and otherwise enduringly inconsolable, you must be careful about those few who will be angry at being wrong.
This seems hard to believe, my friends, but it’s true. In having witnessed previous things that have gotten done, there will be some very loud voices who call from distances near and far to say that yes, you did, despite our earlier claims to the contrary, get the thing done. But, they’ll go on, but you should never have gotten it done. What you got done was very bad and harmful. Why hadn’t you known this? Why did you not think? Are you immoral?
This is an audacious, unbelievable claim; but rather shy compared to a still more audacious provocation. So, these more unhinged people open, grinning demonically, you got the thing done, eh? Allegedly done, that is. How do we know for sure that it is done? Seems all too unlikely given the timeframe and your collective capacity. The thing you got done looks well-fabricated from where I stand, which is nowhere near it. Yes, very clever, they nod all too knowingly!
Astounding, my friends. Simply astounding. Wow.
Hard though it is to say, I urge you to let them seethe. To let them fly into fits of delirium and apoplexy. What harm can inaction possibly bring to us, those who were right, and who matter?
Those who do not matter and are wrong, who thought against all good sense that they were right, will be dealt with in their own time. Time, indeed, will find that it does not require their presence any more than we, those who are actually right, do. History, as always, follows suit after time. Then the matter is moot.
A few will ask, “Who were they—those wrong people?” Even fewer will have something approaching a satisfactory answer. Stories may tell of a noble, dignified caste, implausible though that seems in light of their clear failure of nerve and blindness to correct things. Who cares anyway? By that point we will have at last the privilege of unguarded retaliatory mirth; even if it has no object to be mirthful at.
I should probably note one more before I conclude: those unusual, suspecting people who will ask any one of us, unsolicited, what precisely was it we had gotten done. To what magnitude has it altered the world that surrounds the thing done? How, for that matter, does it affect their own lives?
These, my friends, are important questions that should be raised at least once, and in all sincerity. Do not begrudge their being asked or the sullen spirit of the asker.
But remember that your accomplishment does not entitle others to be given its fullest understanding by you, the accomplisher.
By what right or privilege do these inquisitors seek to understand the delicate tinctures of your heart, to say nothing of the finely coordinated natural light beams scaffolding your soul?
They who care to know so much, I can assure you, will know in time when the legends around it begin to be told. Carried on reverently by those who come after.
For our part, we will not worry about it in the immediate aftermath of our decisive and definitive moment of victory.
Wow.