| When you are born on the bottom rung and now stand near the top, you ask,“How did I end up here?” When you grow up in trailer parks and now live in a beautiful home, you wonder, “How did I end up here?” When no one in your family went to college and you now teach at one, “How did I end up here?” The typical answer to these questions is “Hard work.” |
“It begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War miscalculations.”
There is a lot to unpack from this statement in Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s new documentary, The Vietnam War.
While it was written to summarize the origins of one of the most divisive periods in our country’s history, it could just as easily be applied to other past and future conflicts.…
“There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards, where white clouds of bloom drifted above the green land. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines.”…
This Friday is the birthday of the person whose name is so synonymous with rags to riches tales, they actually refer to them as “Horacio Alger stories.”
However, there are many fallacies associated with both the man and the over 100 stories he wrote about boys rising out of poverty.
Our problems seem intractable. Opposing sides become so entrenched in their world view that any prospect of progress seems bleak.
So we spend our energy either demonizing the “other side” or trying to persuade them to “see the light” and come over to our side.
New research out of Stanford that examined one of the most intractable of all issues offers us hope that real change starts at a more basic level – showing people that ANY change is possible.…
Picture two 15-year-old children. One has a strong family, but lacks ambition. The other has a strong work ethic, but an abusive family. Which of these two do you think would be more likely to achieve the American Dream?
We asked this question as part of our research project looking at the American Dream. Almost 70% of respondents believed that the child in the abusive family is more likely to achieve the American Dream.…
Researchers project that 50% of the world’s population will be short-sighted by the end of 2050. The result of spending so much time focused on little screens in our hands and on our laps, and not enough time outside. As disturbing as that may sound, it is just the latest example of our growing short-sightedness.
Increasingly, we seem to focus most of our energy thinking about how our actions will affect us in the short term versus how they may affect others over the long haul.…
