“You have all the watches but we have all the time”

“You have all the watches but we have all the time”.
The quote is attributed to the Afghan Taliban with reference to the NATO forces “occupying” their country.

Ignore the essential cowardice of terrorism that harasses and murders innocents wantonly and concentrate on just the phrase. What comes shining through is the “audacity of hope”. The pluck that propelled Obama from the shadows of a broken family and a missing father to the pinnacle of power is the same pluck that drives every human endeavor against the twin irresistible forces of Fate and Nature

In the long run Fate and Nature will outlast all human endeavor and therefore in the literal it is Fate and Nature who have “all the time”. The audacity of hope and with it the essential and defining spirit of humanity lies in ignoring obvious and overwhelming advantage.

Out of these dynamics of the audacity of hope I believe could spring a ‘positioning” strategy that could propel worthy but losing causes like the fight against climate change from the margins to the mainstream. The then mayor of London in a conversation in 2008 put it in stark perspective for me. “ All this talk about saving the Earth from coming environmental disaster is bunkum. The Earth will continue fine, it will be us who will be extinct”. Frame the green fight as a fight for our rights and our life rather than a fight for Nature, in fact a fight against the implacable forces of Nature and it will have all of us intensely involved.

So is NATO human endeavor and the Taliban a force of Nature or is it the other way round? Like in all things political the argument can be made both ways.