First Blog

The most powerful words in our highly political country these days are not what you'd expect. You might think, "I love you," would rank way up there. These are powerful words but personal ones. Think of other possibilities. Let everyone respect others. (4) Can't we just get along? (5) Protect our environment. (3) Death to infidels. (3) But these are old, and we are basically numb to these slogans not really believing anything will happen. However, should someone say to this or that event, cause, or circumstance, "I am deeply offended ...," action results. Judges act. Magistrates react. Advocates rejoice. Politicians jump on board. Headline news expostulate. Just be "offended" and you get results. Or so it seems these days.

A. “ Hope and Trust ” is a campaign slogan no one dares use these days – or ever.   Indeed, it seems never to have been used, but every campaigner at some point begins or concludes a speech beginning with the sentence, “I hope and trust …. “   This is the candidate’s principle platitude.   This is the phrase that enjoins the candidate to the voter, the stakeholder of the community.   This is the phrase that conjures faith in the what the following predicate and object suggest.     I presume no candidate will ever have the nerve to venture forth with this loaded couplet of terms as a slogan.   While many hope for the better, and while many have trust better times are before us, none use it as a slogan. It doesn’t resonate with anyone - except in the negative.   It asks just too much to believe. For the politician... Asking for trust is too much to hope for.  Hoping for trust is asking too much. Hope is a vague term having individual meanings for each voter.   Some hope for

Three Simple Words Remember these from our school days, reading, writing, and arithmetic, the basic three R’s? They encapsulate much of our school subjects, and are among the very important things we have learned. More generally, they point a way we classify important ideas and directions in a simple and memorable way. It is the way we work; it is who we are. Let’s generalize. Nowadays, with our incredibly complex lives which include just plain living, politics, education, workplace, and more, we need simplicity to keep everything straight, as it were “all in our heads at the same time.” We need simple rules for complex subjects, partly because there are so many of them. The Questions . How do we, as a people, transmit, contain, understand, remember, and reflect upon, information and ideas? How do we understand the drivers of ongoing initiatives? How do we relate to a subject? How do we express the rules of the game, our game? The Answers . In part... We place our ideas, our