A PERSONAL OPEN LETTER: Id like to reach out to all my amazing pro indy facebook friends and share something with you about myself. I was like you, I walked beside you and I was with you. I gave up so much of the time I could and sacrificed a lot to get the message of our shared dream together out there. I passed up sleep, I passed up work on many occasions and time with my own children with the view that I was helping to build something more, something better for them and their children than the scraps off the table of another countrys government. I went to public meetings. I contributed. I engaged everyone I knew from converting Nos and dont knows to Yes and reassuring those on our own side when they faltered or began to doubt. I canvassed and I walked the streets. I hung Yes signs on lamposts and I wrote articles. I did everything I could so that I could do two simple things; to be able to look my children and my fellow citizens in the eye and honestly tell them I did everything that I could as one person and that to myself afterwards that I could honestly say that I could look back and not feel that I could have done more. I carried on during 18th stumbling forward in exhaustion and hope getting voters out to vote and manning polling stations. I passed the wall of my own exhaustion and I stayed up all night as the results came in one by one. I sat in numbed shock when the final outcome was declared and I was filled with a surreal sense of being completely empty and utterly removed from myself as if in some out of body nightmare I couldnt wake from, I felt anger, rage, despair and I can honestly say its the only time in my life I actually felt ashamed to be Scottish. I felt betrayed by the very people of my country that I had worked so long and so hard for, I wept. I felt filled with anger and hatred towards those who made a free choice to live on their knees and condemn my children to the same future, a future without hope. I felt bitterness so deeply inside me, wanting to rub their faces, in their glib sumbission to their imperial overlords, when they will complain about the bad things that will now happen to them and to us all because of their choice. The feeling of personal vindication when they complain to me or have the temerity to tell me theyve been sanctioned over their benefits, or have to find money from thin air to pay not only for medicines but to actually have a GPs appointment or when they see their children work so hard at school and achieve only to be denied a higher education because this months benefits wont pay for tuition fees. I, without egotism, am certain that what I am sharing with you is a shared experience; that like me, you also experienced these thoughts, feelings and reactions. My friends, I could go on at great length and in detail of the endless forms of self satisfied vindication that I would garner from this and if I am being honest, as I invite you also to be honest with yourselves too, it gave me a modicum of reassurance and ease, a very brief moment of tranquility, of being silent in the eye of the storm. I had lost direction, I had lost faith in everything, I had lost hope. It was at that very moment sitting in the hollowed shell of my own existence that something wonderful happened to me and I feel compelled to share this with you all. I asked myself the most important question that anyone of us can ever ask in life and that question is why. I have always said that if you can answer why then usually all the other questions will answer themselves. This, in my opinion makes why the single most important question that must be answered. To myself the question was why, why had I done all the things that I had done to fight for independence? Why had I sacrificed my work , my time, my energies, everything that I had done? The answer was so simple that I had overlooked it all along and that answer was love. I did what I did because of the love I have for my children, for the love I have for my fellow citizens and their children and, you may find this hard to swallow but its honest, the love I had for those who would want to stay dependant, those and their children that voted No and stood against us. I have long held that we are raised as children on a misconception about life because we are taught that love and hate are opposites when they are not. Love is the embodiment of unconditional trust, fear is the absence of any trust so they are natural polaric opposites. If you take just five minutes of your time to explore this perspective I feel confident that the more you travel that thought road the more a lot of things start to become clear that before we confused. I realised that to hate people that voted No is wrong. I do not mean on a moral or even a spiritual level. I mean wrong on a simple everyday hands on practical level. These people that we may now hate are the very ones we have to win over one day. It is the only way we can build a majority. When you and I can understand and accept this inescapable reality then we can also understand that so so many of the people that did choose No did so out of fear. In order to overcome and eliminate fear we have one basic tool to redress the balance and that is love. Unconditional love is acceptance, redemption, and forgiveness. Please dont mistake this as a religious stand point or a path or a viewpoint of some born again christian as I am neither. If you want a personal proof of this concept simply look to your own children and family and you will see this in spadefuls. No matter how wrong they are or how bad they are we forgive them and we love them without question and without conditions because in doing so we reach them and guide them to better things and better ways of living as healthy emotional and well balanced people, we are investing in our own collective futures. The hatred that we all at some level will be feeling just now towards then, the desire to have revenge by rubbing their faces in it down the line will only push these people away from the truth and entrench them in their own positions and create a divide that will endure when it is that very divide we MUST overcome. Sun Tze outlined the basic concept of why fight an enemy when you can make an enemy fight themsleves. This is exactly what westminster wants us to do , to them both Yes and No are the enemies and for so long as we carry hatred and resentment and bitterness to our rivals then we will always lose because we fail to see they are not our rivals and that together we have a common enemy we must untie against and in doing so will always win. It also states “To surround an enemy, you must leave a way of escape.” Very wise words. Consider this approach when we approach our so called enemies, the 55% that voted No as they are not our common enemy they are only our future allies because it is from their ranks that common victory will come. My dear friends, comrades and citizens when I realised this I joined all the dots and was suddenly filled with such fortitude, strength, hope and energy with the certainty that we will overcome and we will win and it is this alone that filled up my emptiness of the shocked, vacant shell of hopelessness, anger and bitterness and replaced it with something better, something positive and something so strong that nothing can or will stand against it or overcome us all. I chose at that very moment to recommit myself to this cause and not to crawl away forever into the darkness but to stand tall, stand proud and carry on and I invite you now to take your turn and stand beside me as I have stood beside you all before, its not my turn, its not your turn, its our turn together.
Posted on: Sat, 20 Sep 2014 16:22:53 +0000
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