The bureaucrats who sometimes behave like
cult members called another meeting. We decided to go, as there were some
more points to be made and we wanted to ensure that the right people heard
them.
The enemy turned up in large numbers; they
sat in rows and in such as way as to split us up. This was probably an attempt
to intimidate my neighbours and me.
Their schemes didn’t work; we were not
intimidated and the bringing in of extra people backfired on them.
Some consultants we had not seen before were
there, and our spokesman made a speech in which he came out with some very
inconvenient - for the bureaucrats - home truths.
It was an opportunity for us to state our
case to people who had not heard it before and did not know about our
resistance to the plans for our neighbourhood. They heard things that the top
bureaucrats would not have wanted them to hear.
We were all delighted to see that the consultants
seemed very disconcerted and the bureaucrats very uncomfortable..
We even got a bonus in that a low-level
employee, who was probably a bit unsettled by what had happened, crossed a line
with something she said to us, and all the extra people heard her. There was
another uncomfortable silence. I could sense the enemies’ discomfort; they knew
that she had gone too far and given us some ammunition to use against them.
This is just a small-scale example of the
backfiring feature, but it means a lot to me because it comes from personal
experience and I benefitted from it.
