Think about this.
Any 15 year old, in almost any town in America, if you asked them, could find a bag of pot, maybe some meth and perhaps some coke. It would be no big deal. Everyone knows who does it and who buys it and that’s that.
You know who goes to CD stores and thumbs through CDs? Affluent yuppie adults. Not teenagers. Any teenager with a computer can get all their music for free, using a variety of tools, they simple pluck it out of the air and pay nothing for it.
Think about all the intellectual property attorneys and all the money of Sony and the power of Sherriffs and subpoenas. Think of all the billions spent on high tech weapons and all the times police or robots have been listening to your calls and monitoring them.
Yet despite all this display of interlocking power, nothing can stop a 15 year old in Columbus Ohio from buying a bag of pot and then stealing the new Paul McCartney album. Or perhaps having sex with a 16 year old next door.
All the church and moralizing will not stop your children from having sex with someone. All the Jesus music and tax deductible gifts to the mega-congregations will also have a very limited affect on the behavior of
today's teens.
Think of all he M-1 tanks in Iraq and all the body armour and all the communications equipment and all the satellite reccon assets. All f-16s and robot planes and stealth aircraft cannot stop an Iraqi from planting a bomb that will kill an American tomorrow morning.
That's how easily a kid from Ramadi kills a kid from Columbus Ohio.
You can hold upwards of 20,000 people in secret prisons and torture them and still not stop a major terrorist attack.
You can spend literally billions in taxpayers funds on carefully scripted propaganda and still be unable to stop the growing perception that your policies don’t work. Or are making things worse. Or that you’re a liar.
The USA is living proof that money cannot buy you love and that power cannot brings you respect.
In fact, it isw not what you do with a weapon that makes you powerful. It’s what you don’t do.
Soft power if the only actual power anyone ever has. Think of being a manager at an office. If you go around bossing everyone around and making all these rules, people will eventually hate you. Authority is like money. Spend it too fast and you’re out of it.
Soft power is the power given to you by people, not taken from them.
Hard power is only effective when it is applied. Soft power is effective when people agree to respect your wishes. So you can get hard power as long as you are pointing a gun at someone. Soft power comes freely from people and needs not be coaxed out.
Hard power is finite. Soft power is infinite.
Traffic only works when people agree to follow the rules. Traffic is an example of soft power.
Bush and his administration couldn't evacuate 2 million New Orleans residences. He couldn't get there. He won't be able to stop the horror in Iraq. he can't stop Mexicans from coming over the borders and he can't stop Kim Jong Il from creating a nuke.
Keep this in mind while we are being ruled by criminals. Criminals who think their power is absolute. They are all scared and surrounded and cornered. They have no good options. All then hard power in the world isn’t working for them and in fact gets them in deeper trouble. They know when they are out of power, they may be arrested and prosecuted. Because they will only have hard power for 18 months more.
They have no soft power at all.
So they can take your candy away right now and make you cry.
Before long they will be out of power.
And they will have their candy taken. And it is they who will cry.