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This site is full of ideas. Some of them might make you cringe. They may not align with your worldview, perspectives, or experiences. That’s a great thing.

Worldwide slavery

Living in the US, we are understandably concerned mainly with our own history of slavery (when such things are discussed). But I got to wondering, do other countries constantly debate or rehash their own histories of slavery? Slavery is not unique to the United States. Not even close. A simple look at “slavery” in Wikipedia will give you a high level run down of slavery, over the years, and around the world. We tend to look at slavery only through the lens of living in the United States, and how it has left a lasting set of challenges for…

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But we’re in the first world…

Too often, people are quick to dismiss the problems of others. They look objectively at someone who has a relationship or money problem and decide that it doesn’t hold up against those starving in some third world country. Many are under the impression that straight white males have no problems and never have. They speak of them as if their life has been on long string of successes and merely articulating what they want and getting it. You hear people use the phrase, “sounds like a first world problem,” to joke about a problem another is encountering in an…

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Have we overcorrected?

According to this article in Investor’s Business Daily, the earth has been cooling. So I guess we’ve overcorrected. Our response to global warming was to stop driving Hummers, remove the freon from our refrigerators, stop spraying aerosol cans, recycle everything in site, drive Prius’, pollute fairgrounds on Earth Day, and use no more than one square sheet of toilet paper every time you use the restroom (with no flush). But we apparently went to far, because we went from heating the earth too much to cooling it too much. I wonder when we’ll hear the calls to reverse course….

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How many laws did you break today?

There are hundreds of thousands of government rules, laws and regulations, and there isn’t one person in this country who isn’t breaking multiple laws every day – without even knowing it. There simply has to be. There are so many regulations and laws in the books that there isn’t one person among us who knows what they all say. Can you imagine if the government was efficient enough to enforce them all?

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Walk me through your resume…

The worst interviews I’ve ever had have always started with this question. They might as well ask, “So, boil down your 25 years of experience into a five minute answer.” That question is a sign that they haven’t taken the time to read the resume, and they want me to stall while they take that chance to read it for the first time. Sometimes I think the best response to that request is, “How about you take the time to read it, and then call me back with specific questions about my accomplishments.” Interviews are two-way. At this point…

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Unoffendable

There’s always a desire to simplify the complicated. An interest in boiling down an intricate set of events or decisions into one convenient sound bite. So, here’s mine… Be unoffendable. Find humor and joy in everything. Don’t take it all too seriously. Be willing and able to laugh at yourself. There are way too many people actively seeking ideas, words, phrases, visuals, or actions that will offend them. I’m not sure what drives that. Need to justify innate anger? Wanting to have a cause? Seeking purpose? If you’re unoffendable, you’ll see some interesting changes around you. People will start…

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When blacks criticize Trump, it’s racist

Isn’t that what we learned during the Obama presidency? While Obama was in office, white conservatives who had been criticizing liberalism since before Obama was born were suddenly racist when criticizing Obama’s liberalism. It was as if the entire white population of the country was liberal, and then Obama came along, and they criticized him just because he was black. After all, who could possibly have disagreed with anything Obama did or said? But, now that we know how racism works and what it really is, we can apply that rule going forward. And that means Stephen Curry and…

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A matter of perspective

When I hear people say things like, “we can learn so much from our children,” I can’t help but think that it’s the adults who are teaching the kids, not the other way around. But last night, I had one of those moments that reminded me of what those people mean. The kid and I were sitting and talking and there was a glass half full of water sitting there. So I asked, “Do you think this glass is half full or half empty?” She thought a second and said, “It depends.” “If you started with an empty glass…

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Breaking free

I’ve not seen, in my life, too many sculptures that have made too great of an impression on me. I guess I’m more often moved by paintings and drawings than by the more physical arts. But I saw this image today, and I found it quite stunning. It’s a sculpture from Philadelphia called Freedom. The artist is Zenos Frudakis, and this is some of what he had to say about it: “I wanted to create a sculpture almost anyone, regardless of their background, could look at and instantly recognize that it is about the idea of struggling to break…

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Fear: a key ingredient in bad decisions

On more than one occasion, my Dad has told me this story, and he swears it is true: One day, the President of his company was walking into their headquarters. As he was walking in, he noticed that some workers were erecting scaffolding around the outside front of the building. When he got inside, he went to the Building Services Manager and asked “What’s all the scaffolding for?” The manager interpreted the question from the President as a sign of disapproval and ordered the workers to take down the scaffolding. At the end of the day, as the President…

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