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Neglected Memories

One of my closest friends owns a white-table-cloth, fine-dining restaurant and I stopped
in to see him one recent Saturday evening. As we sat at the bar and chatted, the dining
room was humming with activity, every table filled with families, friends, couples on
dates, you name it, a full compliment of folks enjoying a nice night out and great food.

As my friend and I were talking, I glanced over his shoulder and took notice of the table
directly in front of me. Nearly in the center of the large main room, this long table of
twelve was fully engaged in multiple conversations, very animated, some gesturing,
laughing and carrying on, as what looked like three-generations of family members were
enjoying each others company.

But something was wrong.

At the end of the table closest to us sat a young boy on the left side, maybe eight years
old, and across from him, a little girl, a bit younger, both at the end of this table. They
both wore large and colorful head-sets, completely engulfing their ears, as the sat gazing
into their individual tablet-like computer screens, both of them grasping the devices
firmly with both hands, screens perched on the table in front of each child.

As the minutes ticked by, it was clear that these two young kids were completely in their
own little electronic worlds, totally mesmerized and hypnotically fixated to those colorful,
flickering screens. They could hear nothing of the surrounding family activity, their ears
filled instead with whatever sounds were coming out of the computer, completely
detaching them from their surroundings and any meaningful interactions with their
families or each other.

When I commented to my friend about my observations, he told me that in a previous
visit, that same group allowed those poor kids to conduct themselves in the very same
way, lost in their screens and devoid of contact, interaction and family bonding.
What a tremendous social and personal tragedy, depriving these young people of the
fleeting, singular opportunities to socialize with their peers and their elders.

What a lost treasure to be excluded from the collective wisdom, personalities and social situations
that ultimately mold and form them into who they will become and how they will see the
world and learn to behave. All of the words spoken, gone forever unless we hear them.

Those foolish and clueless parents are off-loading their responsibility as decent caregivers
to some commercial foolishness that fills their kid’s minds with whatever comes
gushing towards them. These computer programs are designed to enrapture kids, not
towards that which the parents should be giving them and teaching them, but whatever
that computer program has in store, mainly ways to make them consumers of whatever it
is they are selling.

These parents-in-name only seem to value their own socializing time over that of their
responsibility to raise well adjusted, socially capable youngsters that can actively
participate and contribute to a family dynamic. Doing so only exists in the real world of
the hear-now-and-present, not some animated, brain-numbing drivel that pushes kids into
isolation.

And in a few years, these same moronic parents will perhaps depend on the school and
social welfare systems counselors, therapists, psychologists and social workers to do their
best to take corrective actions to address the social-anxiety, attention-deficit, anti-social
issues that could have all been avoided had mom and dad taken their roles as parents a
little more seriously.

Anything seen on a screen can be seen at any time, there is no immediacy. Those
precious interactions when family and friends are all together, sharing a meal, or a
birthday, or a religious service, these are moments that cannot be recreated, they happen
once, right now, and you take from those times only your recollection, your interactions
and your memories, which will sustain you most after those moments and situations
subside, are long gone, and now reside only in the quiet of your own existence, many
years into your future.

Technology has many great uses. Way down on that list should be using it to substituteparent
your children and acting as a cheap baby-sitter. Give your children, your family,
all those in your orbit all you can give them of yourself because the time, it is fleeting and
the experiences and memories, in the end, are all we will finally treasure. It is your job,
as a parent, to make sure that what memories you child takes to their old-age, are the ones
that will sustain them in quieting and pleasing their souls long after we’re gone.

Please, take the job seriously.

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And Then, the Line Went Dead

I have seventeen entries in my cell phone directory of people who are dead.  Sixteen men and one woman.  My oldest and best friend Mike, gone too soon and in the midst of a dispute we never quite settled, then his wife Nancy, just a few years later, succumbing to breast cancer after deciding to forgo chemo for fear of losing her hair.

Two guys I met playing squash, one a complete crazy person, but in a good way, Paul and I traveled, quite literally around the world together, from NY west, bouncing off countries and continents until arriving back where we started.  His last words to me were that he would kick my ass in squash, days later dying of complications from prostate cancer.

The other gentleman, Joe, was one of my favorite mentors, a masterful attorney and finally a judge, falling too early to the ravages of Parkinson disease and the pleasant indignities of our final lunch together where I had to wipe food from his mouth as he somehow smiled.  I helped to carry him to his grave.

Then Sal, my favorite attorney and one of the brightest men I ever met, he came out of retirement in his mid-70’s because the stock market had crashed, ruining his savings.  This man slept in his office during the week and retreated to his home in the Pocono Mountains on the weekends.  He once kicked a young man-potential client out of his office because he was being rude to his mother.  His wife called me with the sad news of his passing.

Poor Rodney, the black handyman, he did lots of work on my house and my office over the years and we argued mightily about the prospects of an Obama presidency but always respectfully.  Rodney had a young son he would bring along sometimes to the job, a respectful and very polite boy that lost his dad way too early.

Dick, an older man, never married, a modest, middle-class bon vivant and regular visitor to all of the local and popular bars, yet did not himself partake of intoxicants, he rather more enjoyed the camaraderie and socializing.  If you got him going on a historical topic, he would laugh and remember it with fondness and if saddened he was quick to shed a tear, he was a very nice and humble man.  Cause of death unknown to me, he was in his 80’s and reportedly an excellent baseball infielder in his day.

My good friend Patrick, dead in his mid-40’s, reportedly falling down the stairs at home.  “Bones” as he was known, struck and killed a police officer with his car and spend 4-years in prison where he helped to teach young men how to tell time and how to play a higher level of softball.  A rabid Met’s fan and a chronic gambler, he could tell you more baseball stats that a Google search.  A great guy that everyone loved, but tragically failed to launch.

Joe, a man of a bygone era; a husky, handsome Italian real estate man with plenty of friends in all sorts of places, his collection of finely crafted Italian suits was impressive.  Every time I had an article published in the local newspaper, Joe would be the first call I got and every time he would begin by telling me that whatever it was I had written about was, “outstanding”  He never missed an afternoon at the YMCA.

Steve, the little guy who was always tagging along until that time when he went into the Navy and came back the man we all looked up to, literally, as he was 6’5” and 240 pounds of military muscle.  At 40-something he was diagnosed with a rare lung disorder that ended up taking his life on the operating table as they tried a risky procedure that ultimately failed.  I’ll never forget the look in his eyes on our last meeting as he described what he was about to undergo.  I brought my 15-year old son along for that visit in the effort to show him what the difficulties in life look like close up.  It was to be our last meeting.

Another Steve, this one the younger brother of my childhood sweetheart, a brilliant boy that never quite accepted the realities of adulthood, this guy was a magnificent painter, a writer and a musician that embraced the drug culture and all of the illness that came with it, he left behind two children and a sorrowful family that witnessed the sadness of a brothers failure to thrive into his potential.

Then there was Tom, retired early from a state job, loved bragging about sloughing off at work then spent his time drinking beer and smoking pot, heart-attack killed him in his early 60’s before he could figure out how to be a grandpa.

The latest death, my Uncle Tom happened only a few months ago.  We were pretty close, he used to beat me at chess pretty regularly until one day I got lucky and beat him.  Funny thing about it, he realized it before I did because he was such a better player and saw the game far ahead of me.  His death was a real unusual event as he went into the hospital short of breath and at first the docs thought he was headed home after a few medicine adjustments and then all of a sudden he was instead headed to hospice care.  He didn’t even seem that sick and was just basically waiting to die.  Before he did, we talked a lot and he shared with me the book that unlocked his drawing talent.  About a week before he passed, I asked him to draw me and he did.  He was a great guy, a true man of God and a really deep and critical thinker.  When I slow down a bit, I’ll examine that book.

Two of my buddy’s dads are in there, a former limo driver I used to hire for trips to New York, and finally, the brother of an acquaintice that I ended up liking more than I did his brother.

I don’t have the heart to take any of them out of my phone.  Not doing so somehow lessens the finality of what death really is and I’m always happy, and then a little sad, to see their names pop up.

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No Appetite for Change

The Southern Tier doesn’t have a “hunger problem”; it has a nutritional problem in dysfunctional households.  This isn’t from a lack of food, this is the result of families failing their own children.  Local incidents of malnutrition are practically zero.  Poverty and poor nutritional choices positively correlate.  The real medical emergency regarding nutrition is obesity and all of the health concerns stemming from that.  The poorest among us are the most obese.

 

If children are going hungry, it is the breakdown of families not of governments.  The illusion of hunger is a marketing tool that massages donor’s guilt to support the charities payrolls.  Childhood obesity is on the rise, especially among the poor.  In Broome County, more than 30,000 people receive SNAP benefits, (food stamps.) There is not a lack of food or its availability, but families incapable of managing adequate households.

 

With at least eight federal programs available, and nearly every community having a food bank, soup kitchens, church suppers, free lunches, replicated in hundreds of places throughout the area, it strains credulity to accept that anyone is going hungry due to a lack of community care or governmental policies.

 

For the only large grocer on the North side of Binghamton, SNAP is the stores welfare program as one employee told me that approximately 70% of their income comes from some form of government food aid.

 

Some SNAP recipients offer “shopping” services, selling their benefits for 50 cents on the dollar in order to generate cash.  By making the maximum use of all of the free sources of food, combined with their SNAP benefits, those gaming the system create a benefit surplus large enough to sell on the open market of the grocery store parking lot to anyone who pays in cash.  This generates the funds that buys cigarettes, alcohol and drugs.

 

Food banks and free meal giveaways make the donors think they are doing the Godly, righteous thing.  Tossing a box of cereal or a few cans of vegetables into a CHOW barrel makes for easy, pain-free soul cleansing with the tiniest amount of effort.

 

Without means testing, (which no local food giveaway does,) no controls are in place in order to calculate the righteousness of those seeking the assistance.  Those defrauding the system are using the good will of decent people that are unwittingly supporting their drug habits, addictions and other vices.

 

A SNAP program so liberalized as to accept almost anyone is an all-you-can-eat vote-getting machine.  Attempting to regulate the kinds and qualities of foods recipients consume is of no interest to politicians that need them fat and happy enough to keep pulling the lever for politicians that keep the free stuff coming their way.

 

Knowingly inducing obesity and learned helplessness isn’t very Godly.  However, requiring proper nutritional balance and limiting choice to the most cost-effective brands would buy fewer votes and therefore is an idea without a prayer.

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Tit For Tat

Our hero and media created protagonist, Daniel Penny; White Knight, Marine, clean-cut college student, minding his own business, quiet and peaceably heading to the gym, is billed to the public as the embodiment of Mighty Mouse, entering the subway singing, “HERE I COME TO SAVE THE DAY” and then promptly taking down the local scumbag and 42-times arrested public nuisance Jordan Neely, heroically saving everyone from sure death except, when it was over, Neely wasn’t the death merchant, Penny was.

Public support and sentiment for our hero is so overwhelming, a Google search seeking Penny’s past interactions with the police, instead, automatically shifts to the prior arrests of the man he killed.

Former police officer Derek Chauvin must be shaking his head from his jail cell, second-guessing himself for using his knee on George Floyd instead of the apparent Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free conventional chokehold Penny used.

Or maybe, there is an undercurrent of score-keeping here where public sentiment tends to even-up the scores on these high-profile, racially charged events that form and define the quality, conscience and character of our country, depending of course on which side we take.

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Clueless Coeds Court Legal Liability

Censorship is alive and well, even celebrated, on the Binghamton University campus by the feckless student leadership of WHRW radio.

I and my co-host have a weekly, hour-long public affairs show at 6PM on Wednesdays.  We were thrilled to secure a long-form interview with noted University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. What made this a real coup is the fact that Wax is a nationally known, super-high-profile educator and the first tenured professor in the nation to be sanctioned for her opinions by a year-long suspension preceded by a multi-year Star Chamber-like sham investigation and trial, as well as a significant pay-cut.  Because of Wax’s situation, constitutional issues regarding first amendment violations were ripe for discussion and we were planning on fleshing out these issues during our interview.

We thought that the leadership of WHRW would be as excited as we were.  Ironically, instead now Binghamton University has itself trampled on Professor Wax’s first-amendment rights.

The WHRW Public Affairs director emailed us a few days before our interview to remind us of our obligations to abide by FCC and radio station regulations, (which we had never previously violated.) She stated, “Given the controversial nature of certain relevant topics, we want to make sure you are up to date on and in compliance with FCC and WHRW rules and regulations.” Additionally and inexplicably, she emphasized our duties to avoid profanity, indecency and obscenity, as if this was somehow a concern, which it was not. And finally, she said this: “Secondly, given the nature of the guest and topics you wish to discuss, we will need a full list of questions and topics that are to be discussed, in advance, as to make sure that we are in compliance with all rules and regulations.” 

Even though these demands were unprecedented and unreasonable, we promptly answered her concerns only to have a second set of conditions made by the General Manager of the station. Here is a part of those demands, “Given the harmful nature of Amy Wax’s statements, which have led to the University of Pennsylvania sanctioning her, I am concerned that this interview may not only fail to be educational but may potentially harm our listening community. In order to go forward with this interview, you must provide me with a transcript of the questions you will ask Wax, as well as a written statement explaining how you will ensure that the interview does not result in the airing of harmful statements and language. Please have this to us by the end of the day on Monday, October 28th, so that we may review it before the proposed interview.”

We again answered all of these new concerns, only to be informed, 5-minutes before our

show was to air, that Professor Wax was not going to be allowed on the station. Clearly, denying Wax a voice was their intention from the beginning and all of the rhetoric was pro-forma and in obvious bad-faith.

Here is what station management said:

“The WHRW Board of Directors had decided via vote that the interview with Amy Wax cannot go on as scheduled. Having her on air does not fulfill our mission statement as described in our organizational constitution. We thank you for your understanding.”

Well, save your thanks because we do not understand.

After a careful review of the WHRW mission statement, we could find no “mission” that prescribes active censorship, the refusal to hear opposing viewpoints, or the wholesale closing of small minds apparently allergic to free expression and the exploration of what is the truth. This little group of ill-informed and constitutionally-illiterate student station managers has exposed the university to likely legal consequences for the blatant violation of constitutional protections as enshrined in the United States Constitution.

After considering what we might do next, we learned about a former Penn law overseer that had resigned his trusteeship in defense of professor Wax.  After reaching out to former trustee Paul S. Levy, he graciously accepted our invitation to be a guest on our show, only this time we made no advance notification so that the WHRW Overlords couldn’t censor us.  Fortunately, Levy was the focus of our last show and he explained what happened to professor Wax in some detail, of course enlightening and informing the audience in a way station management had previously declared, “… not fulfilling our mission statement,” which of course was a red herring for their will to simply shut down voices thy happen to disagree with.

The following quote from a Kamala Harris speech sums it up nicely:

“What else do we know about this population, 18 through 24? They are stupid. That is why we put them in dormitories. And they have a resident assistant. They make really bad decisions.”  

I am truly saddened to witness the failure of Binghamton University to properly educate their young charges, failing to press them out of their pre-conceived and shallow opinions and to face opposition because the only way to test ones hypothesis is by challenge and examination. These poor kids have been taught what to think but not how to. 

Let’s not forget, every radio has an off button.

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Along for the Ride

So Kamala Harris shares heritage from India and Jamaica but identifies as black?  I though being black was the provenance of African heritage and why is it so sensitive of a question to raise?  Is it not a legitimate inquiry?  Usually when a question provokes such a disproportionate and angry backlash, it indicates that the inquiry is hitting a nerve because those being questioned have no good response.  Why are not African blacks offended when non-Africans are appropriating their culture for political purposes?

It’s funny, when Jessica Krug and Rachael Dolezal masqueraded as black women when they are white; they were taken to the wood shed for their temerity in culturally appropriating race.

If you don’t remember these two, Krug was a college professor of African Studies at George Washington University back in 2020 when according to a CNN post, she outed herself in an on-line magazine article where she said this in part.  “To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City under various assumed identities within a Blackness that I had no right to claim:”  Later in that same CNN article, Krug is reported saying that she had no right to claim these identities, posting “doing so is the very epitome of violence, of thievery and appropriation, of the myriad ways in which non-Black people continue to use and abuse Black identities and cultures.”

Krug lost her teaching job and was pilloried by the local black community.

The story of Rachael Dolezal got more national attention.  Back in 2015, Dolezal was a prominent African studies professor at Washington State University.  She was also the head of the NAACP in Spokane, Washington.  And then some enterprising reporter interviewed her parents, who were both white.

NAACP President Cornell Brooks said of Dolezal, “just because one appreciates African American culture, it doesn’t mean you can disrespect the culture.”  CNN contributor Steve Perry said, “he resented the “cartoonish approach” of a woman he called a “fraud.”  Dolezal was ripped to shreds on Twitter as exercising her White Privilege.  She lost her job and was removed from her position at the NAACP.

So why the wildly different reaction to Kamala Harris?  Could it be that instead of Harris appropriating black culture, black culture is appropriating Harris?  If Harris can pass for black, especially in a world that is so afraid of culturally or racially offending, the black community can hook their wagon to Harris and have her, hopefully, pull them along for the ride with her.

And so there I think I have answered my own question about the seeming double standard.  The black community will hold you accountable for appropriating their culture, that is unless there is a payday and in that case, ok, let’s talk.  The chances of the black power structure walking away from Harris on principled grounds were as likely as an OJ guilty verdict or BLM passing an accounting audit.

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Hope & Change 3.0

In 2008 I wrote that Barack Obama was America’s first affirmative action president, just black enough to be black enough and just not black enough to be a pill Americans could swallow without choking.  And just to prove in wasn’t a one-off, Americans did it twice.

For those with a good memory, you’ll recall that in 2007, then Senator Biden described then Presidential candidate Obama this way …” “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Classic identity politics as defined by the guy who would later become Obama’s biggest tool.

Obama was the perfect man for the job of beginning the dismantling of America and George Soros backed him for that reason among many others, with the key being his total lack of patriotism and his lack of belief in American Exceptionalism.  If you remember, Obama, soon after being elected President for the first time, went on an apology tour around the world for America’s past.  This is what the Heritage Foundation had to say about it in 2009.  “A common theme that runs through President Obama’s statements is the idea the United States must atone for its past policies, whether it is America’s application of the war against Islamist terrorism or its overall foreign policy. At the core of this message is the concept that the U.S. is a flawed nation that must seek redemption by apologizing for its past “sins.” 

At a rally in Milwaukee in 2008, Obama’s wife Michelle said, “for the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country — and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change.”  In other words, she was never patriotic and only happy with “her” country once her husband was president.

When 8-years weren’t enough to hobble America, Obama needed a useful idiot to run Obama 2.0 and who better than Joe Biden.  Malleable, agreeable, feckless, lacking principles and easily led, only at the highest levels of American government can you hide a pervert in plain site, conflate fool and sage and ignore senility until it transforms itself, like a butterfly from a cocoon, into a selfless act of courage in quitting, our hero exits stage left, no right, no left…

And so in the side door slinks former unsuccessful presidential candidate from the 2020 campaign, Kamala Harris, having burnished her credentials on her knees as a 29-year-old courtesy of Willie Brown, then a 60-year-old political power broker who paved her path to the District Attorney’s office in San Francisco in the 90’s.  Then San Francisco mayor, Brown hooked her up into California’s high society, plugging her into the money pipe line which financed her eventual successful campaign for California states Attorney General.

But Willie’s thing don’t swing that big outside of California and Harris demonstrated for us the embodiment of the Peter Principle, (pun intended) when she became the first presidential wanna-be to bow out of the 2020 race a year before it happened, the weakest of 13 candidates yet somehow sneaking that camels toe into the tent and attaching herself to Uncle Joe, even after calling him a racist during the debates.  Politics and bedfellows you know.

Fast-forward to now and figure that Obama has got his mileage out of Joe, poor guy staggering towards the finish line but too baffled by his own bravado to know how incapable he really is, forcing Obama to threaten Joe with the 25th Amendment, (after trying everything else.)  And now we have Harris in the enviable spot of heir apparent, sliding into a virtual incumbency without a single vote being cast.

All hail the new barren queen!  Obama 3.0  (Wonder if she has a cat?)

And so here we go with the hocus-pocus again, the same treatment that got Joe

“Re-imagined” now gets a make-over for Harris as black, even though she has no

African descendancy but never the less, by simply saying so, she gets to play the race and gender cards.  It is surprising to me that actual Black people aren’t offended by her appropriation of their race.  Oh, and as an added bonus, if you dare have the temerity to question or tamper in any way with the gender and or race issues, you are immediately dismissed as racist and or sexist, completely marginalized and with that, conveniently disposing of any substantive questions that have legitimacy but tread on the sacred turf of the Woke-Folk at your own peril.  Her campaigns over-reliance on this little trick will back-fire because her record is a very hard one to defend, so we’ll see if someone can break through.

But just like our worry all along should not have been about Biden, it shouldn’t be about Harris either.  You see, both are the same place-holders as the useful idiots for the puppet-master himself Barack Hussein Obama and company.  Neither Biden nor Harris do or say anything that isn’t approved by the High Table, take your pick on who that may be, but it sure isn’t the characters we see in front of us today.

Think about it for just a minute.  If the ascendancy to the presidency was merit and morals based, would the cast of performers paraded in front of us actually be the likes of these people?  When you stop and think about it, haven’t we all thought that we know people in our own orbits that are more capable, smarter and more trustworthy than the characters we see in some of these high offices?  Clearly, we aren’t seeing the best and the brightest but you can bet that there is a power, a cabal, a plan being orchestrated by someone who needs plausible deniability and anonymity in order to carry it out and those being touted to us as leaders are anything but, they are simply tools and they depend upon us to be their fools.

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Election Decided

You could conclude from what happened at the Trump rally Friday in Pennsylvania that maniac’s rule the world.  After all, a deranged 20-year-old seeking to stop former President Trump from becoming the next leader of the free world has instead insured that he will be.

Those who hate Trump, led by a dishonest and complicit media machine have spewed so much vitriol, hatred and lies about him, it was their hope that their fever-dream rhetoric  spawned a violent response and it did.  Yet in the expected aftermath, cowering behind their plausible deniability, those same haters and liars now denounce violence and offer up their, “hopes and prayers.” 

Really?

Their “hope” was that the assassination was a success and as for their “prayers”, they’re a Godless lot to begin with so spare us more of the same lies and instead ponder this:

Donald J. Trump was selected to be the next President of the United State of America on July 13, 2024 and the Crazies on the Left made it happen.  November’s Election Day is now a formality and oh how sweet the irony, talk about the ultimate in “early voting”, and unlike the Democrats version, it required no cheating.

From the moment Trump stepped onto that escalator in Trump Tower in New York City in 2015, the Deep State, Admin hacks and the Mad Media have done everything to stop him, up to and including the hope of ending his life and again, ironically they have instead breathed into him new life.

And to all of the Deep State operatives, apparatchik, media crazies and administrative state drones, know this and understand that which Samuel Johnson said about 400-years ago rings true today, “Revenge is an act of passion; vengeance of justice.”

“Draining the swamp” was a quaint colloquial term coined by Trump back in the first campaign but now, after experiencing what the breadth and depth of the problem actually is, “Nuke and Pave” might be a more accurate assessment of what has to happen next.

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Don’t Ask Me

Six relationships outlining and defining a lifetime, evenly divided between the unequal expectations of mine and theirs.  Miss-matched, miss-meshed, messed up, my own misgivings. 

While pretending in a choreographed life, I was really just fooling myself; placating either the nagging reality of maintaining a forced-fit or the eventuality of the inevitable and uncomfortably sad exit.

My hope, every time, was for both of us to be happy and content at the same moment with the same intensity and for the same reasons: equal love for each other, but we never got it just right.  It was at its grandest a beautiful illusion before it became the reality-checking delusion ending in a heart-hardening thud. 

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The Art of Understanding: 

How embracing a simple concept can bring warring parties closer.

Human beings are programmed to perceive their surroundings; a natural guidance system necessary for operating in an ever-changing environment.  It is what we see, what we observe.  Our ability to perceive is an “a priori” mechanism, an instinct, hard-wired into our brains working hand-in-hand with our senses. 

Because this is a “default setting” in all of us, it is easy to over-value the assuredness of our conclusions based upon it.  Every incident that emanates from our perception is validated for accuracy by observable confirmation.  Repeated confirmations create biases that can erroneously predict outcomes weighted heavily on past experiences and not on the present.

Perception comes from the Latin word, “percepio” meaning receiving, collecting and possessing with the mind/senses.  Most of us mistakenly assign one-hundred-percent assuredness to our perceptions and this can lead to very wrong conclusions.

You’re stopped at a traffic light and the car in front of you isn’t moving although the light is green.  The drivers head is facing down and only after you use your horn does he begin to move.  As you approach the next light, the same thing happens, his head is down and he is not responding to the light turning green.  Again you use the horn, now thoroughly annoyed and sure in your thinking that the guy is texting, drunk or high.

If you had known that this man was just coming from the hospital after his wife had passed away, your perception of the events, although accurate, would have yielded you a very different conclusion.  While your rote observations were correct, your conclusion was based on too little information and too much conformational bias based on past experience and probabilities. 

What was missing here was perspective.

Many people interchange perception and perspective but the two are very different.  When these two concepts are understood and used to compliment one another, we are transformed into powerful observers with the added benefit of insight.

Perspective, in Latin:  “perspectīve ars”, the science of optics, to behold and inspect intensively, carefully.  Perspective is “Big-Picture” thinking from not only our point-of-view, but also from an observable distance.

You’re a movie actor struggling in your first Hollywood role.  The set of the movie is a single room and your role is to argue with your fellow actor.  The set is hot, you’re nervous, the director is a task-master and you get through the day not really feeling like you accomplished much.  You go home discouraged.

When the movie is finally release to the public, it is met with enthusiasm and excitement.  Your role is nominated for Best Actress and you can hardly believe it.  When you see the final product, you can hardly believe your own eyes.

While she was working, our actor’s perception was the accurate reality of hot, repetitive and frustrating work, there was no connection or validation in that moment of a greater creation.  Only after the film was edited, produced, distributed and viewed was the acclaim forthcoming.  In perspective, the whole of the parts come into focus and the earlier perception, although accurate in the moment, was not any indicator of the bigger picture.  Armed only with her perception, our actor might have quit mid-way and never realized her potential.

The tennis players on center-court at the US Open, battling each other for the championship, both super-focused and dialed in, they demonstrate perception personified.  They man in the stands watching them, sipping a beer and cheering on every great shot, he exemplifies perspective.

Adding the element of perspective to our arsenal of understanding encourages more examination, more insights, and more knowledge.  Being able to see not only the bigger picture, but those images as seen by the others involved with whatever it is you are attempting to understand, will allow you access to resources you never knew were available and make you a much more thoughtful and wiser person.  When you learn to observe the plight of others, from their point of view, and then deal with them in consideration of that understanding, you become a much more approachable and seemingly reasonable person, easier to deal with and more comfortable to be around because you took the time to see the whole situation from all perspectives and not just your own. 

You’ll know when you have successfully embraced this way of thinking and reasoning when the moment comes and you have a sudden change of heart about something you thought you knew and understood and yet you have the courage and the insight, to change your mind.

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