The day the bad guys won

July 27, 2019 Power never lasts.And the tighter you grip it the more it slips like sand through your fingers and leaves your hands empty.This may take days or weeks or even decades, and so on days like this, when it seems like the bad guys won, I tell myself they haven't.And for those of us who seem to have been exiled from the kingdom, outcasts from what we thought was Arthur's perfect realm, we need  to realize, too, that inside those noble halls, those who remain hate each other as much as they ever hated us, and must live with each other, hating each other, more than they ever hated or feared us, sharks living among sharks, always fearful of teeth that might dig deep into them they way their teeth once dug deep into us.We all lived in one big fish bowl where they feed on guppies like us, but now that they have fed on the last of us, we feed on each other.This is poor satisfaction for those of us who spent decades building our power right, brick by brick, instead of body by body, making alliances rather than petty schemes. In the short view, good guys always seem like suckers, having done things the way were taught to do them, living by some moral code that avoided using and abusing others in our climb to the top.On days like this we need to tell ourselves that these mountain climbers really aren't getting to the top of a mountain, but to the top of a dung heap, their own petty egos painting it as something more, and that those same egos will eventually bring about their downfall from even that un-lofty height. We need to convince ourselves that we won even when it seems we didn't, by retaining a moral highground they for all their ambition lack, and that even in exile, we remain the ones who won, though at moments like this, we do not feel like we have.We need to remind ourselves that sharks will remain sharks even when the fish tank is empty of everything but sharks, and we must learn patience, learn to heal ourselves, wait and watch for that day when these sharks turn onto each other – knowing that it must come, knowing that sharks must continue to feed, and in the end, must consume each other.On days like this, we need to remember that all power hungry people carry inside them the seeds of their own destruction, weaknesses they cannot see in themselves, either because their egos won't allow them to, or they simply do not know themselves well enough to avoid their inevitable demise, and that on some future day, the final grains of sand will slip out from between their fingers, and when they open their hands, they have nothing.