The Speech
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The great meeting hall that claimed to have been the site of so many momentous and historical moments was now hushed, as he made his way to the podium. Those ten steps were eagerly taken, but he knew they also sealed his worldly fate. Once he opened his mouth few would applaud, or call him, or ever be interested in his work and understandings again. This was fine.
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He realized he had being striving all his life to be a tremendous flop in the next little while, if they gave him a while. He smiled as he took step number five toward his destination. He thought of those ears, all those separate ears attached to heads that would soon be driven to ache because of the words framing the ideas containing the explosive seeds of wisdom that he was privileged to transmit today.
At step number six he thought of the three thousand eyes that would try not to see and the fifteen hundred mouths that would be wiped of their smiles, becoming tense thin lines of disapproval. He could almost feel the fifteen hundred stomachs refuse to digest the lovely lunch, provided with the fee for the conference.
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It was a terrible, awful thing to know something few others did, and it was more awful to know you were going to tell them. What does one say to the residents of Dresden, five minutes before they are bombed into a fireball? Or Hiroshima? He expected the same utter disbelief. The bodies facing him accepted such occurrences as necessary at times. If his message were of imminent disaster, disaster of that sort, they could handle it. But what he had to say would be un-handle-able. All their cleverness and might, all their conclusions and projections, all their counter deterrents and speculations would be as naught – reduced in a flash to irrelevance.
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At step number seven he felt what they would feel. They would feel the inability to assimilate what was being said; it would not fit into any category they recognized as themselves or their world. But it would not feel foreign, so it could not be dismissed as gibberish. They would try to close their ears, they would try to shout him down even, but the familiarity of his words would find resonance in their hearts. This would produce fear.
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He was ready for this wave of fear. It was something he had had to prepare for, and he had taken himself into scenarios that produced terror. That had not proved difficult, for the cult of fear was expressed everywhere. That had been a bit unexpected, and had helped him to arrive at the podium today.
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He was ready to feel a wave of sickening unnaturalness that stank like decay. A natural living human was repulsed by that smell and the arguments that went with it, such as “that’s the way it is.”
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On step number eight he reviewed what “the way” was that so limited so many to such unpleasantness. The way of suffering. And, strangely enough, they would defend that right to suffer, at the expense of everything else. Well, when you suffer you usually don’t include much else. What a waste of time. The way of separate, isolated individualism, alone and fighting for survival, using anything on earth to ease the pain and being primarily occupied with being distracted by various entertainments. The absolute worst thing on this way was to be alone with one’s supposed thoughts, thoughts that ran along the line of a trillion “what ifs.”
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On step nine he perused the ability of the capitalist to profit on the what ifs of the world; the trillions of dollars and pesos and eurodollars and rubles that changed hands, counting on fear and distraction-driven consumerism. Sucked of almost all life – suffering humanity poured gold into the coffers of dream merchants, gurus, arms manufacturers, wellness analysts, and a legion of other tricksters. The monkey king rules and makes toys for mankind and mankind into toys. Today, the broken doll factory is rather more elaborate, what with brain scans and organ transplants. Now everyone runs from the doctor’s office to the pharmacy; staying alive has become a full time job, if you can afford it. However, no one ever asks the difference between being alive and Life. It is just consumed.
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At step ten, the podium, he was out of rage; he was inspired, loving, utterly beyond the bonds that fettered those eager, mildly amused faces that looked up at him. There was a deep chatter of applause, and as it subsided he thought, “how can I tell these wonderful human beings that they are totally wrong, not in themselves, but in what they think?”
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He heard a whisper in his ears – “they just need a good kick in the butt, Charlie. Go on.”
He spoke: “In the words of the immortal Shakespeare – ‘you blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things…’”
He spoke the words softly and sincerely. He looked deeply into the eyes of those in the front row. He saw shock, a little hurt, and some confusion. There was total silence. He gazed, they gazed; time passed, but was not wasted. He and fifteen hundred others were locked into a silence that sounded inwardly, and he saw the stress of the work on their faces. Something was happening as the whole great room sounded in silence.
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Then, from the middle of the crowd came a clear voice. “Right on,” it said. Somewhere else: “That’s telling us, Charlie.” Somewhere else – a booming guffaw. A woman in the front row stood up, applauding. The man beside her was dabbing his eyes with a hankie.
Stepping back from the podium, he turned, and his first step was into a present so totally different from the recent past that it almost overwhelmed him. His knees felt weak but his heart was light. “They got it,” he thought. “They get it!”