you needed competence to execute…and you needed friends in high places. You needed funding. You needed public support. You needed to be able to force it through. Most of all, you needed power. Too many activists think there is something noble about being outsiders. They think the whole system is corrupt. They think the system is the problem. They’re not wrong—there are real problems. But because of their idealism and purity they’re not able to do anything about those problems, and so they themselves are part of the problem all the same. It’s very hard to change that system from a distance.
