Mouth In Motion Before Brain in Gear - Workplace Edition

It's not easy being a Massachusetts Yankee living in the south, even though diversity and tolerance promotion seems to be the first agenda item at my company's staff meetings these days. Today we had a diversity ice breaker. Raise your hand if you're a male, raise your hand if you're a female, raise your hand if you were born in the south, raise your hand if you were born in the north, raise your hand if you were born outside of the United States. Then this wiseguy co-worker leans over and quietly says: 'Hey, being born in Massachusetts IS considered being born outside of the United States"! That was a swipe at Mass's liberal reputation.

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There is one thing that I don't understand about the corporate world. My company will kick off a big initiative. It will be an important, high level project that is frequently talked about by management. But then they ask for 'volunteers' to help with the project! What's with this volunteering approach? If you're sitting around and have time to volunteer for stuff maybe they don't really need you anyway! Let's take the first three people that volunteer and eliminate their positions. See if the company can live without them!

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I think the government needs to adopt one practice from the corporate world. That would be the concept of billing your time. Whenever we get asked by a project to assist with research or do analysis, we usually ask for a project number to bill the time to. I think the government should do the same thing. This would have been nice during General Petraeus's testimony before congress. The guy is supposed to come in and report on the situation in Iraq and instead our elected representatives waste at least 100 minutes of his time. He listens to congressman dis the Iraqi government, his microphone doesn't work, and protesters are allowed to disrupt the hearing. All this occurs before he even gets a chance to say his first sentence. Petraeus should have been allowed to bill that wasted time to congress. What a joke.

The Current Struggle

I don't get many newsletters in the mail but I did have two arrive on the same day this past week that both made reference to the West's struggle with Islam.
In the first newsletter, Ravi Zacharias warns that the West's inability to consider the potential impacts of Islam may result in the continuation of our way of life being 'theoretical'. Zacharias says:
"By the complete failure of the West to understand Islam and its secular prophets who evict Christianity from the academy, we are gambling away our own destiny. If this trend continues the survival of our cultural context will become 'merely academic'." - Ravi Zacharias, RZIM Volume 11 Fall 2007.
The second newsletter contains a piece written by former Navy pilot Stuart Witt who describes his experience on a flight which transported the body of American Marine Jared Landaker (pictured above) home to California. Lieutenant Landaker lost his life serving in Iraq. Click here to read Stuart Witt's narrative which was included in the Focus on the Family newsletter.