"You shut Up" - "No you shut up."

To quote a great American, "Why can't we all just get along?"  I'm not sure of the date, but Rodney King said that at some point after recovering from his Officer Induced behavior modifiers.

I am constantly amazed that everyone does not agree with me 100% of the time.  How can we all have the same information and then reach different conclusions?

I'm not saying its a bad thing; it just surprises me.

I remember when my daughter was born.  A part of me said, "Make sure to buy her dolls and stuff so she knows she's a girl."  This was not a homophobic thought.  It was more due to an uncertainty about the role of environment on a child's development.  Anyway, she turned into a girl.

Later, my youngest son was born.  For some reason, he immediately started doing "boy" things.  I didn't need to buy him toy trucks.  It was just natural for him to see what parts of the dog were removable.

My lesson was that boys will be boys and girls will be girls - or not - all without my input.

So, are we born Republican or Democrat?

On one of my recent posts, I waxed political for a bit.  My sister (aka Patty) responded with "Nice post although I don't always agree with everything in it.  My mom (aka my mom) also responded with nearly the identical comment.  So, Mom and Patty don't agree with everything I said in the post.  That's fine with me.   The interesting part is that the part that one disagreed with was very likely the part that the other did agree with (and vice versa).

How can this be?  One raised the other so there had to be some influence - right?

This leads me to a story, one that actually happened.

I took an MBA course about 15 years ago.  One day, we broke into groups; they do that a lot in MBA classes.  Each group was told that they had been in a plane crash in a remote part of Alaska.  Each group had a list of 20 items.  Their task was to prioritize the 20 items to keep in order to maximize their chances of survival

This was a lot of fun.  It turns out that there is a right answer to this problem.  Newspaper, for example, makes an excellent insulator so it was more important than a gun.  I was in favor of a gun.  When the professor answered that a handgun would be of little use against a Kodiac bear, I explained that it would of great use in keeping my fellow passengers in line. Plus, if we were stranded a long time, it was way easier to hunt passengers than bears.

The bottom line was that we had fun and in the end, we all agreed to the logic behind the "right" answer.

Then we broke out in groups again (see, I told you we did that a lot).

This time, we were put in charge of a YMCA that had to cut programs to make its budget.  So it came down to cutting youth baseball or senior activities or AIDs counseling or any number of other activities.  My group, in fact all of the groups, found this to be a very hard and frustrating task.  You could hear the arguments from other groups through the walls.

It turns out that there was no right answer to this situation.

This time we were arguing about values.   The purpose of the exercise had been for us to see that not all arguments are about objectivity.  Many are about values and you can't simple solve the issue with a calculator.  It's like trying to change someone's religion or better yet, like trying to teach a pig to sing.  It doesn't work and it annoys the pig.

On to more meaningful stuff.

My coffee clutch was doing its random thing when someone (Scott) wondered out loud how he should go about cooking a banana slug.  I asked if he had a Banana Slug and he said no but he may want to blog about it.  I asked if he had a blog and he said no but if he did, he would want to be ready to talk about cooking a Banana Slug.

This all sounded reasonable so we dove in.  I suggested poaching it.  My thought was that you could make an Eggs Benedict type thing out of it and we all know that everything tastes great with enough Hollandaise Sauce on it.  Someone suggested we could microwave it but that was quickly shot down.  If there is any way to make a Banana Slug explode, it would be to put it into a microwave.  We had just begun to discuss the virtues of a sauteed Banana Slug when we heard one of the women nearby say something that sounded like, "Red Panties."  All of the men became instantly silent and leaned slightly towards the women.

The women seemed to notice this and quickly moved off onto another topic.  As did we.  Who is going to eat a Banana Slug anyway?

I wish I could stay but the world out there needs me...

Up, up and away...

j