The Power of All

Replying to this.

When one person decides to protest the powers that be, it will be easy for the greater organization to just ignore that small fry.

I have time and again stressed that my goal is not to complain. I want everyone to know what is wrong in the chess arena. Because up until now, no one really knows. All they do is just play in "nice" tournaments. Raymond, to be honest, NO ONE knows about these fixed tournaments. How do we stop participating in them? Maybe it would be good if you can publish a list of fixed tournaments so that I do not make the mistake in joining them? By the way, that was sarcasm. I feel like I need to cue you when I am sarcastic now.

For change to happen, it definitely requires the support of more than one person. Heck, it would probably require the support of the majority. But the problem here is, the majority sees NOTHING WRONG with the current situation. Why? It is because they are not aware.

So if the majority does not see the need for change, whatever revolutionary ideas or what you call "wish-lists" will never go through. My goal is not to complain. Your narrow mind has led you to that conclusion. I am spreading information so that EVERYONE knows where the problems lie. The majority MUST know what is wrong so that we can fight for change, together.

Even if you were to be able to implement change, without the support of the majority, it will sooner or later revert back to the same old rot that we were once in. The people's mindset must change first. Unless you employ a dictatorship, which basically means you can do whatever you want without the permission of the people, nothing will ever change. Hey wait, that sounds familiar.

Your call for individual empowerment only makes you sleep better at night. You can tell yourself, I did my best, and that's the best a man can do. Wrong! I am sure I do not need to educate you on how a team of individuals can accomplish more than the sum of its parts. I am now collecting this sum. I have a plan, and there is a long way to go before the combination is fully played out. I am fully aware of my role. What I am doing now is putting the pieces in the right squares. You are just the distraction.

You are just fighting your own battle without a real plan. You look at your position and tell yourself that you have a good bishop, even though you are playing 1 rook down. If you try too hard to focus on what has been done correctly and ignore what is wrong with the position, you would have failed in objectively evaluating your position. You cannot just "forget" that you are 1 rook down and play along.

As any practical chess player would tell you, you must first acknowledge the threats to your position. If you ignore your opponent's king side attack, and try to go for an all out attack on the queen side and hope that you beat your opponent before he mates you, then you are just playing like an amateur.

We (I suppose I need to be specific here, since you tend to be confused with who I am referring to. By "we", I mean the chess community.) are all still at the stage of assessing where we went wrong. Only the minority have honestly tackled this issue. No one is dwelling on the past. Do you dare challenge the saying, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"? What you now know as history is only 7 short years in a grand scheme of events. Even if you want to focus on what we have done right, there is a lot more history to be examined than just the past 7 years. If you study China's history and only look at the past 32 years, you would have only seen how China has reformed and emerged as an economic power despite the small glitch in Tiananmen. But China's history is more than 5000 years-old. China has been an economic power before. What happened? We cannot afford this myopia. We must always have the bigger picture in mind.

You are like a history student who just took a glance at the past 32 years and forgot about how the 5000 years has formed the Chinese people as we know them today. But you want to go ahead and conquer the future. That is of utmost danger to the chess community. If the Chinese leaders believe they can become a "super-power" again and forget that even the mighty China was brought to its knees not more than 500 years ago, they will be bound to repeat their mistake.

Let go of your imagined fears. Do not be afraid of admitting mistakes. Find the right dots to join. Don't just keep joining dots blindly.