Here’s why talking about gun control directly following a mass shooting is ineffective:

• we don’t know details about the shooter or the gun or how he acquired it
• the only way to have a productive discussion if specifically citing the Newton tragedy, or using it as a springboard into the discussion, is if your stance on gun control would have prevented it. The only thing we do know is that we don’t know.
• there are too many unknowns to have an educated, rational discussion on the topic TODAY

When should we have the discussion, and what should we be doing in the meantime:

• continue the discussion after we know more details. Emotions are high on both sides. Respect the dead and provide support for the families and friends in mourning
• pray for healing. So much innocence lost today.

Look for a blog post on Sunday about why conservatives seem so afraid of the “gun control” talk.

My brother coerced me into watching The Nightmare Before Christmas with him this year. I’d never seen it (which, apparently, pained the soul of his friend who watched along with us). Enjoyable movie, but I was more excited afterward to share the business lessons I learned from it. Chief among those lessons was vision.

If you’ve never seen the movie, I can’t help you there (and don’t tell my brother’s friend you’ve never seen it, either), but if you need a refresher, here’s one courtesy of Wikipedia:

Wandering in the forest outside the town center, [Jack Skellington] accidentally opens a portal to “Christmas Town”. Impressed by the feeling and style of Christmas, Jack presents his findings and his (somewhat limited) understanding of the holiday to the Halloween Town residents. They fail to grasp his meaning and compare everything he says to their idea of Halloween.

We’re familiar with the Proverb about people perishing without “vision.” The same can be said of organizations, of all kinds. It’s business 101. Somewhere along the way in my venture, though, I conflated establishing vision to mean cheerleading a team of people to a common goal. I believed, like Jack Skellington, that so long as I had the vision, and the team had the end-goal in mind, things would come together quite swimmingly.

As Jack came to learn, however, everyone on the team filtered his Christmas vision through their preconceived ideas of Halloween. In the end, everyone was working toward the same common goal (Christmas), but they couldn’t see where they were going.

Establishing vision is in fact more about being a light on a path, pulling weeds, pruning trees, and actively discarding distractions from team members. More simply, establishing vision requires constant action, whereas establishing a goal requires nothing more than lip service.

Fortunately, like Jack, I realized my error in time to change course, but still stand to see whether we’ll have a Merry Christmas after all.

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My first job, aside from mowing neighbors’ lawns for extra money, was at a local amusement park sweeping trash. The routes I worked included a caricature stand, where artists would draw pictures of people that exaggerated their physical features. Will Smith and his dopy ears, Jay Leno and his jutting jaw, Mr. T and his overly furrowed brow. Mine happened to be drawn during my formative years, when my face hadn’t quite caught up in size with my ears and nose. And that’s exactly how the artist drew me: a human incarnate of Dumbo.

While these pictures have elements of truth to them (you can easily identify the subjects in the drawings), they don’t tell the whole story. They conflate reality with perception.

Every day on social media, however, political dialogue resembles something of “discourse,” but it’s little more than shouting matches between polar caricatures of belief. This is why opponents of same-sex marriage are perceived as anti-gay and hateful, and those in favor of strict gun control laws want to strip us of our freedom and our 32 oz Big Gulps.

I’m afraid it’s too late to steer the discourse surrounding same-sex marriage to something more agreeable. After all, how can you compete with a successfully executed propaganda campaign that makes no attempt to disguise its intent to completely shutdown all dialogue?

This doesn’t mean we can’t take steps to avoid the same hijacking of the gun control debate. After the public shooting in New York City today, with images of the mass shooting in the Aurora movie theater still fresh on our minds, both sides are going to come riding in on their high horses, trampling on the graves of victims, while making grand accusations of their opponents.

Caricatures can be fun, but as Mr. T would say — I “pity the fools” who think themselves warriors after battling in a field of straw men.

My Dad and I were discussing “love” and romance this evening, when I told him that romance is something that doesn’t come natural to me. It’s something I have to be conscientious of or else I might easily fall into a comfortable routine. This prompted him to pull out a box full of letters he has between his parents (who died of natural causes before I was able to meet them). My grandfather Ed wrote my grandmother Jeanne nearly every day for several years while he was in the U.S. Navy. As far as I can surmise, this is his first letter to her after being shipped to training:

Place-
“Somewhere down in Kansas”
June 18th, 1935

At last I’ve gotten down to where I can try and write you a letter — understand — I said “try” and write one.

It is now about 7 p.m. and the porter brought in a table for the gang to play cards on. So I monopolized it long enough to write to you.

We had a fairly decent trip to Omaha though we were riding in fog and rain most of the way. We got in there about 1 o’clock and had dinner and then went down to the Recruiting Station for our examinations. Believe me, they were plenty particular and did they ever handle us rough!! There are just 13 of us going to San Diego out of over 300 applicants which means that each one of us was chosen as the best man physically, mentally, etc. out of about 25 men. You can see by that, that they were awfully strict. [Mark: this is my grandpa doing some bragging. Work it!]

We left Omaha about 6 hours ago and have been passing through some pretty scenery although about 10 miles back we passed through a part of a (illegible) flood area along the Republican River.

We are going to San Diego in a private car holding just the thirteen of us and a porter who [sic] preparing our upper berths for us right now and believe me I am going to crawl in plenty early on account of I’m (illegible) tired as (illegible)!!

Our train is the Rock Island and our route takes us through Lincoln, Nebraska, part of Kansas, Colorado (if we pass close enough to “Grand Canyon” to see it I’ll try and describe it in my next letter.) We also go through “Salt Lake City,” Utah and stay 3 hours there. From there we’ll go back south through Los Angeles and then to San Diego getting there around 2:30 Friday afternoon and then the work begins.

I suppose my past cards are well on the way, darling, but (illegible) I won’t be able to get any answers or here [sic] from you until I get settled in Diego, which means there’s going to be one sad, lonesome boy for almost two weeks when I can hear from you!

I’m thinking of you all the time darling and will write again sometime tomorrow.

Until then —
All my Love,
Ed