There Are Some Fights U*Us Can't Win. . . Even If U*Us Had All The Fire Power U*Us Needed. . .

Here is my complete point-by-point response to a thoughtful and thought-provoking blog post titled 'The Limits of Force' on Rev. Christine Robinson's "less than perfect" but probably not "less than excellent" iminister blog. I posted only the first part of it as a comment to that thoughtful blog post to spare Rev. Robinson from having to decide whether or not to delete aka "memory hole" my response to her thoughts.

:There are some fights you can't win. Even if you had all the fire power you needed (however you define fire power in your particular fight), if you used it, you'd destroy something too precious to you to make it worth it.

Of course one does not always realize this before one decides to fight. . .

:So even though you might have every right to fight, you don't fight. Even though you really need what you might win in a fight, you don't fight. If you're angry and feel threatened, you master yourself and you don't fight.

See above.

:This is a very hard lesson. But most people have to figure out how to learn it.

Unfortunately it is not always possible to predict which fights are "unwinnable" or, even if they are "winnnable", will take much more time and effort to fight and win than one initially thought when one decided it was necessary and/or worthwhile to fight.

:Most nations have to figure it out, too.

The so-called "U*U World" has to figure it out too. . .

I'm still waiting for the U*Us at 25 Beacon Street in Boston, and at the Unitarian Church of Montreal, to figure out that they can't win the fight that they started with me and have dragged out for over a decade now. . .

:There are some fights in which no amount of force will get you what you want, need, or have a right to.

Or don't have a right to. . .

Some foolish people fight for things that they want but have little or no right to.

:You have to get those things in a slow, roundabout way. Sometimes the other party has to come to exactly the same conclusion.

Sometimes the "other party" deliberately makes things slow and "roundabout", as in far from "straight" if U*Us catch my drift, in order prevent people from obtaining what they want, need, and have a perfect right to. Can U*Us say "institutional stonewalling and denial"?

:It is usually perfectly obvious to bystanders when someone has started to destroy themselves in their quest to get what they need.

Well that is certainly true of bystanders in the vicinity of suicide bombers. . . It is less obvious to bystanders in other cases. That being said, both sides in a conflict often partially destroy themselves in their quest to get what they need, or indeed need like a hole in the head. . . Does the UUA really "need" to harbor and protect "less than excellent" U*U ministers are guilty of unbecoming conduct, or even worse forms of clergy misconduct, when it is perfectly obvious to virtually every "bystander", U*U or otherwise, that *someone* has started to destroy their credibility to say nothing of their reputation?

:It is rarely as obvious to the involved parties.

Apparently not. . .

Our little war of words would have ended over a decade ago if U*Us at 25 Beacon Street in Boston and the Unitarian Church of Montreal had stopped to think about how they look to "bystanders".

:And because the calculus of when, exactly the use of power becomes detrimental to the powerful is a very personal calculus, only the involved parties can actually know where the line is.

I guess U*U COP flunked calculus or something. . .

Come to think of it, I was never big on calculus myself. ;-)

:It's hard to watch.

Oh I don't know Rev. Robinson. I know a good number of "bystanders" who think that it is outright hilarious to watch. . .