As the year 2017 comes to a close, millions of American adoptees are no closer to receiving equal treatment under U.S. laws than they were decades earlier. In 1975, the United Kingdom long moved on from this issue, giving all adoptees full access to their records once they turned 18. In fact, the issue of adoptee equal rights is not even a concern in most developed nations. Not so in the United States, the country with the greatest number of adoptees than any developed country in the world.
Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War
From a strategic perspective, most U.S. adoptees have not organized cohesively or embraced successful strategies that have altered this battlefield. This includes the all-critical inner battle of the mind that must occur first before any change and tactical advance occurs on the messy, fluid field of combat in the real world. I believe its time to reset the chessboard and start anew, starting first with each individual adoptee.
I recommend that adoptees read author Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War, and more. His treatise on war offers a cool, hard look at human conflict and offers wisdom demonstrated by historic greats from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Muhammad Ali. He provides a set of ideas how to grab victory from whatever conflict and foes you face.
I just published The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto. In it, I draw from key concepts explained by Greene in The 33 Strategies of War, which I think adoptees should consider as they choose how they want to live their lives and then change the world around them, including the adoption system that denies millions of Americans basic human rights. Most of these ideas are explained in greater detail in my forthcoming memoir on the American adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. The strategies I describe in my essay are:
Author Robert Greene
- Projecting Strength, Not Vulnerability
- Learning from the Masters and Applying that Wisdom
- Having a Grand Strategic Vision
- Learning from Defeat
- Defining your Opponents and Exposing Them and Their Weaknesses
- Becoming a Fighter, Not a Victim
- Defining The Battlefield
- Knowing Your Enemies
- Launching a Revolution of Thinking
Greene notes that all persons can benefit from thinking strategically, to achieve critical life goals: “To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away.”