We count

My wife called her sister today to wish her happy birthday, something she does on a regular basis, since there are ten girls in her family, but this reminded me of the last time I talked with this particular sister. It was about five years ago and she was telling me about a local TV person who wanted to interview her about some current affairs and she declined saying that she wouldn’t know much about the subject. I was upset when she told me that story and I explained why I always feel that my opinion counts as much as others.

You can take any controversial subject and you will find people on both sides of the issue who are experts, people who have spent years investigating the facts, and have reached certain conclusions. Since these people disagree you could flip a coin and have just as good a chance as being right as they have, but the problem is in the word right. In most of these situations the “right” is very hard to define and is subject to the foibles of human bias and misunderstanding.

I told her that she could use her 80 years of life experience along with her God given common sense and come up with an answer that would be just as good as anyone else. I told her that I wouldn’t place too much faith in “experts”. We have all heard the definitions of experts and my favorite is.

An expert is a man who knows more and more about less and less until he finally knows everything about nothing.

When I see these experts on TV I want to inject one thought into their heads and it is an old adage that is one of my favorite sayings.

When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.



I will close with a comment on one of my favorite sports figures, Coach John Wooden who died this past week at the age of 99. He was the first college coach to take in the inner city boys and teach them about life and treat them like sons, an approach that is followed by most coaches today.

My favorite quote from Coach Wooden was
The finest thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother.