America by design

So I'm reading this book called Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh and it is spot on when giving info about how bad the Iraq war is going and also how bad it has been since 9/11. I know you may be thinking "what does this have to do with design?" Well the book talks about how people who think they know what is best in a certain arena (in this case intelligence on terrorism via Donald Rumsfeld) they come into power and second guess experts and agencies who have been in the field doing the work for decades (FBI/CIA). Lets just say things get messed up beyond measure and we have the powers that be pointing fingers and claiming deniability. What I'm talking about here is SELFISH PRIDE—a effect of human frailty. Its a very ugly thing when we have control over something we know little about and we spin our agenda on what we think it should be, but sadly is not. I am not immune to this. But I do recognize I do this and that is, at the very least, what we all should do.

Personal Example: I got out of college thinking I had a good idea of what web design is—basically all flash, which is what my instructors taught me. These are the same instructors who worked nearly they're whole life in print design not web. So I get my first job and get into an argument with our web guy who shows me the world of HTML & CSS and how google driving traffic to your site is so much more important. |BLINK!| the light goes off in my head and I see a whole new perspective and I have a new respect for web programmers. The reason for this? —I listened (skeptically at first) and gained a new perspective from someone who has been doing this for longer and really knows more than me. We still debate how a web site should look overall, but that's okay, we just find a compromise because there is respect for one another.

We ALL need to ask questions and listen and trust that those who do the work really know what they are doing. And when things fail we need to listen, explore, investigate where they REALLY went wrong and work together to rectify the situation.

I was getting depressed think about all this and how things need to change when I actually heard our national play on my itunes radio. It got me to thinking about how we really all are in this together—no matter how hard-headed any of us get (including politicians) , when it looks like this country is failing, we are all in this together—we always need to remember that. As our forefathers said: "God bless America, our home, sweet home."