TAKING A SECOND LOOK TODAY 8/24

OPPOSITES DON'T ALWAYS ATTRACT

Everyone needs to be liked; but not everyone also needs to be right. It's hard to be both at the same time....!

To be liked has no real price to it. Just cater to the positions of those around (see authors Dale Carnegie and Norman Vincent Peale for details). In contrast, to be right can exact a very high price. It means taking a stand and stoutly defending it (see lost friends and dinner companions for details).

Confucius said a great many things, but one of the more intriguing is: "What is important in life is not to be liked, but to be liked by the good people and disliked by the bad." That helps conflate these two opposites, for it implies it is worth the price to defend your position as opposed to the wrong positions. Of course, the ancient sage does not instruct us as to who are the "bad."

With or without Confucius, democracies are especially contentious, because everyone is encouraged to have and take a position. Remember your old US History classrooms...? That's where you learned about the marketplace-of-ideas. The so-called healthy collision of everyone's different ideas from which is supposed to emerge the eventual will-of-the-people. Something like a jury system, where the law counts on the eventual whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.

So whatever the latest great debate is in a democracy, it often comes down to this: The winner is simply the last one standing. Whether he or she is right (or liked) is left to historians to decide. The historians have the advantage of a few years or generations to decide. In the meantime, all we can decide here is whether we want to be liked or be right.


400% MORE HATRED IN THE AIR

The percentage of threats against President Obama is 400% higher than that os any previous president (according to the New York Times). Wanna guess why...?

Naturally, there's no way to know for sure, but there are several good speculations handy. Barack Obama personifies three of those things in life which most enrage most people: (1) Change (2) Boldness (3) Them.

Change -- be it with taxes, healthcare or government in business -- is uncomfortable. Especially to those who like things just the way they are. Right now, this administration smacks of the passion for change seen in other presidencies like Teddy Roosevelt, FDR and LBJ. Their changes made a lot of progress, but also a lot of enemies.

Boldness is something we like on the playing fields -- a daring quarterback or a dangerous downfield runner -- but when it comes to changes, we intuitively say: Not so many and not so fast.

Them is all of those who are not Us. When someone tells Us that Them have to share in our pie, it leaves a bad taste in our mouth.

By Secret Service math, this 400% jump in threats is no surprise. It's as American as apple pie!