Attitude
When Success Runs Amok
My senior year in high school I had the privilege of being the featured speaker at the Junior-Senior Banquet. I was certainly not the first choice for the role, and I was absolutely not the best choice. At the time, I had no intention of speaking publicly for a living. However, I accepted the challenge…
Read MoreThe Pattern for Social Stability
The last few years American society has experienced a rapid decline in basic social stability. One by one, various cornerstones of morality and civility either have eroded beyond recognition through neglect or have been destroyed through the combined blows of political activism and judicial overreach. Competing factions on the social and political spectrum have grown…
Read MoreWhat Did You Expect?
Author and poet Maya Angelou famously said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” While this may seem harsh on the outset, so long as we allow people the opportunity to grow, change, and improve, the truth underlying this quotation has biblical roots. In fact, our problems in relationships, on…
Read MoreThe Power of Positive Wording
Words have tremendous emotional power. They can convey the deepest love or the strongest hatred. They can lift people’s spirits or leave them beaten and abused. Unfortunately, we rarely pay significant attention to the words we utter. We speak to be heard without considering the emotional impact of the words spoken. However, even if we…
Read MoreResilience
The year 2020 has created such a downward emotional spiral that everyone keeps trying to guess what will go wrong next. January seemed to take forever, and then February added tension and whispers of problems. March brought the COVID-19 pandemic to our doorstep, and April ushered in all its consequences. Just when everyone had absorbed…
Read MoreThe Path to Maturity
Rebellion against authority, selfish demands, and violence dominate the headlines today, accompanied by various justifications rooted in ignorance of history and its value, in newly concocted microaggressions visible only to the easily offended, and identity politics so removed from reality that meaning ceases to exist. Sadly, the cacophony emanating from riots not recognized as riots,…
Read MoreStriving, Quarreling, and General Disagreeableness
In only six months, the year 2020 eclipsed the chaos of any other year in recent memory. It opened with the impeachment of a president and quickly pivoted to a fast and furious primary cycle, only to find COVID-19 furiously stalking the world and, through shelter-in-place orders, turning a robust economy into an economic catastrophe.…
Read MoreInevitable Conflict?
The algorithms of social media encourage polarization. However, I do not mean this in some conspiratorial way. To the contrary, the programming that determines what we see on social media combines several metrics, including, but not limited to: (1) words and phrases that reflect high interest subject matter, (2) attention demonstrated by others regarding certain…
Read MoreHow to Overcome Strife
Division and strife dominate the news cycle once again. The ability of people and the media to pivot so quickly from division over candidates to division over pandemic policies of various kinds to division over ethnicity and injustice boggles the mind. It appears impossible for people in today’s world to engage in serious issues without…
Read MoreIt’s Not About You
It seems like so much today encourages self-absorption. The typical social media profile contains more self-portraits than previous generations would have amassed in a lifetime. We have opinions on everything and believe that it is everyone’s obligation to hear them. Advertisers insist that we deserve just about every material thing they can offer us. Selfishness…
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