PATCH
ADAMS
SPEAKING IN RUSSIA
THE LOVE REVOLUTION
Patch Adams is the famous American clown Doctor. He was played by Robin
Williams in the movie of the same name.
I had the privilege of travelling to Russia with Patch for 2 weeks. The speech
below I recorded on Patch's annual clown trip to Russia in 2002. This is an
excerpt of a talk he gave to the clowns about the love revolution in a hotel in
Saint Petersburg. This should be recommended reading about life. He is an
incredible and inspiring person. Yet in a normal world he would be ordinary.
Strange irony!
"A lot of how you speak will not help a love revolution if I could show
you how you spoke. You can see that you are inarticulate about the week. If
love is to make a difference it can no longer be inarticulate. False humility
(Patch refers to clown) ... is great to everyone, speaks like she is less great
than I ... Cannot tolerate this type of thinking any more. If you really want
peace and justice, really want President's and world leaders and a world that
survives, you got to hear that people think your great, know your great and get
to work. Get articulate about it, Great does not mean greater than, not a
comparison or competition, everyone is great, most people give it up or never
see it. Not one of you isn’t great diagnostically. Without operating from
a base of feeling you are great you not going to be able to do your dreams for
peace and justice, you will be mouthing them, got to get articulate.
Can’t stumble over what you experienced on this trip. What it meant 'oh
it was great and loving' it is important to analyse it...
In a love revolution the money and power revolution operates with a very few
people and wanting to lessen that number all the time. And they lead through
money and power over model from the beginning of recorded history. The love
revolution will never lead from the few to the many. A revolution where
everyone is the leader. No one will feel like a 'not' leader. This trip was
lead. How you make a group of people that are completely diverse and different,
don’t speak the language, within 24 hours make them feel part of a team,
is a made thing. If you are interested in learning about leadership I can talk
to you. The main way it happened is in the people you choose to work with. The
MIR team, individual people, exposing you to Maria and her team choosing the 5
of us who lead the trip. All that made this experience happen, it did not
happen by happenstance, happened by direction. Not happen by me ordering things
around, it happened by you taking yourself in hand and deciding on this trip to
be loving, to be a group.
Since 911 I’ve been asking my audiences 'what is your love strategy?', we
know the revenge, fear, violence strategy. People go into the twin towers blow
up, lets blow up Afghanistan, boy was the country behind it. Did anyone in the
Pentagon say, you know its never worked, violence has never worked in history,
I wonder how love would work on it.
So I started to ask 'what is your love strategy and how are you implementing
it'. This trip is a love strategy. It is manipulated to give you two weeks to
see what regular day to day loving and service would be like. Ladies and
gentleman these are average, it becomes special in a world of loving money and
power. These are average days in a loving world. A bunch of diverse people,
don’t even share the language, really having fun with each other, looking
after each other of all ages. We have the first 9 decades represented here. We
have people who don’t speak the language, people watching me not knowing
what I am saying. Sitting here absorbing something.
We don’t have a lot of time. You can’t be wimpy about being loving,
if you like this, you made your part. No-one here made your part in it. If the
whole is great because each one made their part. You can learn it. Learn how to
go into a elevator and make the love revolution right there. Walt Whitman was a
revolution, Einstein was a revolution, most revolutions have been non-violent.
The love revolution is not going to have a violent anything. You notice when
you watch people speak last night about loving. What happened, how it happened,
your own role in it, how you might carry it on. It was created by leadership. A
different kind of leadership. A simple way it is called is servant leadership,
have the people leading work harder than the other people. Again, I’m
saying these things partly because I have my own concerns about how long
humanity can last.
If you have experienced two weeks of people getting along, loving each other
and sharing and being ready to contribute. How many had a 10 minute talk with
Marina. Wildman asked you to give your money to. You may cough up $20 to
someone you didn’t talk to yet you want to do it. That's how everyone is
fed in the world. This is the
microcosm of the solution
. We are not perfect as people but love is having us all have what feels like
a big experience only because we don’t have the day to day experience of
a loving tribe. Anthropologists say that for most of human history this is the
rough size of the tribe. Which is why it is this size. That tribes were for
100,000 of years about this size. Everything done can be quickly learned. You
have a chance to experience, try to make friends with this many people. Quickly
feel the friendship with a stranger, can’t say you spent much time with,
but you felt connected to them. That is how you don’t want to bomb Iraq
– is to feel connected. That corny thing that we are all brothers and
sisters you can actually know it is possible because you did it here. No one
here will have a deep conversation with everyone here, yet you will feel that
you did. It feels like you all feel this way. I want to offer my services to
you to say that everyone is a leader. And most all of why anything happened
here is because the leadership that happened here is friends working with
friends. Olga, Svetta, Arina, Marina and Maria know those connections. I only
see them two weeks a year. I want you to have a lot of time and spend with
them.
I want you to wonder what your love strategy is. And if people on this trip
are saying you are great I want you to dare to believe it. Don’t be wimpy
about feeling your greatness. And for some reason you cannot find that quote
from Nelson Mandela’s inaugural address, write me, no one person or small
group of people in history, in leadership, will make the love revolution
happen. It will happen by some critical mass of huge numbers of leaders
leading. Huge numbers of people leading side by side each other, not in front
of each other. Blissing out on the trip when you actually see that love can be
in this action. Next time you are with 30 people try to create it and see how
complicated it is. You already know how hard it is to create it by themselves
unless they learn the skills. Every person you are with in an elevator if you
learn how to do this (lean toward them) it is a giant start. You can be
rebuffed, hit, raped, all sorts of ways that that gesture is done and a lot
milder ones, that scare people from that gesture for the rest of their lives.
Look and study leadership of mixing diversity of unknown people, making a
family feeling within 24 hours. That is possible, you can get better at it
every day, if you think in that moment is your love strategy."
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