It is one thing to shout a warning to someone you see walking into danger. That is an understandable, almost automatic response, whether the person is about to step into a manhole or mail a few thousand dollars to someone who has a real deal to offer on oil-rich property at an undisclosed location. Once you’ve done it, you’ve done your duty, whether the person pays attention to your warning or not.
Warning someone that they’re being too cautious, and need to walk into danger they’ve already spotted is another matter. You will not be thanked for trying to break someone’s instinct for safety, and, after all, if they turn out to have been right, and you have advised them to be reckless, you will hardly be thanked for your advice.
I have written before about a friend of mine who has moved from this plane of existence, as another friend likes to put it. When alive, no one was more organized or businesslike than she. That her carefully thought out plans never seemed to work she attributed to corruption in government or incompetence on the party of her partners. She had a gambler’s sensibility, though. If you lose, you shrug and go on to the next game.
She spent years and numerous dollars setting up her syndicated radio show. She had a great idea for a show, and had signed up thirty or forty artists to appear on it. And she took no risks: not for her the idea of doing her show online: the Internet was full of scoundrels and not safe. She would stick to good, reliable radio. And, to make even more sure she would deal only with honest, upstanding souls who would realize the true value of her program, she offered it (at a minimum three million dollar contract) to college radio stations.
Incredibly, she found an interested party in her hometown. The University of Chicago considered her ideas intriguing, and invited her in for an interview to talk things over. She turned them down.
She explained to me that what they wanted was simply not safe. Her father had always told her a white woman should not venture into the South Side of Chicago. And Hyde Park was definitely South Side.
“That’s true,” I told her. “The University kidnaps white women and forces them to work as philosophy majors.” She laughed at this, as well as my other warnings, and went on with her own business plan. She died far too soon, and I believe she left her contracts and sample radio programs to the University of Chicago. (I hope someone there realized not ALL of the painstakingly prepared demo discs were blank; she did learn how to work the computer the second year of her campaign.)
Another friend of mine, who lectured the Chicago School Board on how to spell “CAT”, had a plan for revolutionizing the world of education. She wrote a number of articles on her ideas (one of which she handed off to Barack Obama during one of his campaigns) and worked for a long time on a book which would spell out her theory of how children learn to read. I was dubious about her basic principles, but had to admit they were worthy of publication. She appreciated my support, but this did not extend to my advice on publishing her pioneering work.
“I’ll have to publish it myself,” she told me more than once. “It’s a book that will make every other textbook on teaching obsolete. So if I offer it to a textbook publisher, they’ll buy it just so they can hide it somewhere in a back room and not threaten their own income.”
Turns out she had also picked this up from her father, who had told her of a friend of his who invented an automobile engine which did not require gasoline to run, so a petroleum company bought up the rights to the invention and then suppressed it.
But she had her whole campaign planned out, even to how she would promote it. She would go from talk show to talk show with her book, promoting her message and…. But later, she decided even that wouldn’t work.
“Oprah would never want someone like me on her show,” I was told. “She doesn’t really want to cause controversy.”
I am seldom rendered speechless for very long, and when I got my breath back, I objected. Like my other friend, she just nodded kindly, knowing I had no idea how the wicked world worked. And, like my other buddy, she died too soon, without seeing her dream turn to reality.
In both those cases, the dream may have been better than reality; my warnings might have brought only trouble. I do not remark about self-sabotage from some smug sense of superiority. Have I ever told you about my first day of classes in college, when a young lady came over to chat and leaned WAY over my desk, so that I could see that under that light summer dress, she was pretty much barefoot all the way from Dan to Beersheba? She said we’d met before and should get together later and talk over old times. My reply was noncommittal, and somewhat incoherent. This sort of thing as not part of my plan for college.
I still think there was trouble ahead. But if…oh, well. Couldn’t have blogged about it anyhow.
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