MORE DOTS THAN WE KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH

Smart people are always talking about connecting-the-dots. It's true, isolated facts and stats are useless until some someone can discover what the patterns therein are saying to us. As individuals and especially as a nation in an age of exponential change.

Now consider for a reflective moment the difference between dot-connectors like say a medieval farmer and a 21st C sociologist. One has only a handful of home-grown dots to work with; the other has millions of new print and digital dots being published from around the world every day. Whose task is tougher? Leaving that subjective choice to others, can we agree on this much...? Today there are so many dots of data, it's like having a thousand-piece puzzle being dumped on us every new morning. And while we have banks of whirring computers to help us, for at least a little while longer, the human brain must still be the final puzzle-solver.

What, however, are most of these brains working on these days? Bustling think-tanks bustle with legions of bustling brains, yes. Still, The Wall Street Journal has taken time out to report how many of our brains have been weighing such weighty dots as who would make a better president: Charlie Sheen or Sarah Palin. Which has to make some of us think of crazy Nero fiddling while Rome burned. [Oh, if you're curious, 44% of Democratic voters chose Charlie over Sarah while 37% of Republican voters chose Charlie over Barack. Neither Tiger Woods, Chris Brown, nor Lindsay Lohan were among the Journal's galaxy of dots].

Other hotly reported dots in the news this month almost beg for a fiddler to play to them....

While there are Romes from Milwaukee to Tripoli burning, Americans still had time to sit by the tens of millions in front of a new vomit of reality shows, richer-than-ever game shows, and the Los Angeles Times report that while 91% of all cosmetic surgeries are for women, the number of aging-boomer-males is growing rapidly.

With dots like these one has to wonder if "the voice of the people" is still earning the right to be taken seriously. Voices currently used to jeer teacher & police pension plans, to find evil in any government agency not currently affording them benefits, and to argue we have a Kenyan-raised Muslim socialist leading us to ruin from his unearned office in the White House.

To coin a phrase: Different dots for different dimwits.

As the tide of history continues to shift in problematic directions, "we the people" have been blessed/cursed with more dots than we know what to do with. Now either we get better at selecting the ones worth connecting, or we best give our best elected dot-connectors the loyalty they need to do a job we're too distracted to accept.


* For those who want to remember >> memorylane.com
* For those who want to keep abreast up >> ted.com