#dues

So Rick wants to show off his meetings with BJU admins, wants to dangle the prospects of a 501c3 in front of well-intentioned people, with his idea of "Fundamental Board Reform."

And collect $$. Don't forget the $$.

There's only one path forward for "board reform," Positives. I laid it out for you weeks ago.

If Rick is not doing that, he's just finding a new way to collect dues.

Now, there are several thousand things that one has got to say in the context out of which we’re speaking. Consider the fact that in the life of a man [or] the life of a woman — in anybody’s life — there are several elements always at work. The crucial element that I want to consider here is that element of a life which we consider to be an identity: the way in which one puts oneself together [and] the way one imagines oneself to be: [for example], the reality, the invented reality standing before you now, arbitrarily called Jimmy Baldwin, who contains a great many other things. We’ve agreed. We’ve succeeded in striking a certain kind of bargain with the world that this is his name, and this is what he does, and this is who he is. Okay. But, that’s not it.

Beneath that, forever [and] for everybody, is something else: a stranger — the stranger with whom one is forced to deal day in and day out. Forced, in fact, to discover. Forced, in fact, to create (as distinct from invent). Life demands of everyone a certain kind of humility: the humility to be able to make the descent that Nietzsche was talking about. [...]

In my life, as I’m sure in your life, when one is young, one supposes that there is some way to avoid disaster. When I was a little boy, for example, I used to tell my mother: ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. I’m going to go there. I’ll be a writer. I’ll be a fireman. I’m going to do! Do! Do! Be! This!’

And momma would look at me and say: ‘It’s more than an ocean’.

It took me a long time, a very long time, to begin to realise that she was right and to realise what she meant. I, like all of us, thought I knew what I wanted and thought I knew who I was and thought that I could do it — and we all do this — without paying my dues.

Because of all the things that one cannot imagine, especially when one is young, is how to pay your dues. You don’t even know there are dues to be paid! And later on, one begins to discover, with great pain and very much against one’s will, that if you want something, whatever it is you want, at bottom, must be to become yourself. There is nothing else to want. Whatever that journey is, one’s got to accept the fact that disaster is the condition under which you will ‘make it’. The journey, I mean. Not ‘make it’ in the American sense. And you will learn a certain humility because the terms that you have invented, which you think describe and define you, inevitably collide with the facts of life. 

And when this collision occurs — and make no mistake, this is an absolutely inevitable collision — when this collision occurs like two trains in a tunnel, one’s got the choice (and it’s a very narrow choice) of [either] holding on to your definition of yourself or saying as the old folks used to say, and as everybody who wants to live has to say: ‘Yes, Lord’. 

Which means to say yes to life. Until you can do that, you will not become a man or a woman.

Now, in this country, part of the dilemma (which could become a tragedy) of being what is known somewhat arbitrarily as an American [is that] the collective effort [and the collective delusion] until this moment has been precisely my delusion when I was a little boy: that you could get what you wanted and become what you said you were going to be painlessly.”