I am re-reading books from the past, some that influenced me, some that pissed me off, and some that created movements that piss me off today.

Today’s book fits the latter category. As I was browsing through used books a few weeks ago, I came across a paperback anniversary copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, so I picked it up.

Atlas Shrugged is a 1032-page unreadable novel, in which Ms. Rand misrepresents ideas from some rationalist philosophers, mostly of the 19^th Century variety, without attribution (probably a good thing), adds the wonder of solipsism, ices the concoction with a dollar sign, and brags about inventing a new political philosophy/religion called “objectivism”.

The capitalist god Ms. Rand uses to present this “objectivism” is John Galt.

The “nut” (pun intended) of the book is found on pages 927 through 984, which comprises God Galt’s rant to the public. My favorite part of this condescending soliloquy:

…. With the sign of the dollar as our symbol—the sign of free trade and free minds—we will move to reclaim this country once more from the impotent savages who never discovered its nature, its meaning its splendor. Those who choose to join us, will join us; those who don’t, will not have the power to stop us; hordes of savages have never been an obstacle to men who carried the banner of the mind.

Then this country will once more become a sanctuary for a vanishing species: the rational being.

It is worth noting that “rational being” is one divorced from any belief in higher beings—God.

On page 984, God Galt states: “I swear—by my live and my love of it —that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Ayn Rand, God Galt’s creator, atheist evangelist for selfishness (her word), preacher against anything smacking of “welfare”, and heavy cigarette smoker, found herself, as she was facing death, becoming a “welfare queen”. She considered Medicare a form of welfare. She had no choice in the end but to ask for help from “another man”—the state.

This atheist author, and this novel, with its ill-conceived ideas and poorly constructed paragraphs and sentences, became a bible for the likes of Ronald Regan, Ron Johnson, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, Clarence Thomas, Gary Johnson, etc. It became an integral part of the tea party and today’s Libertarian Party, and a sizable sect of today’s Republican Party.

These “Christians” cheery pick from Ms. Rand’s novels, as they do from their Bible, what they want to believe, and what they want to use as cudgels with which to mold this country to their ideas.

I wonder where the rational beings are?

Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones

It was an ugly building

No matter the attempts to dress it up.

Rough lumber formed sides and door.

Tin on the roof, sometimes.

Surrounded by flies in Summer,

And poke berries for color.

Winter brought frost.

Ice and snow found the wall’s cracks

And covered the seat

Which had no lid.

Scraping was required

Before business conducted.

The building

In winter taught self control.

The path was not trod unless

There were no other options.

In summer it taught tolerance

For odors, textures, and flies,

And snakes.

The building

Was educational,

Housing reading material

That served multiple purposes.

I learned about the latest

In bicycles and toys,

And ladies’ undergarments.

The building

Had one hole.

Churches in the country had two.

I marveled at the fact.

Rich people may have had two, too.

Perhaps.

The building

Was my hideout,

Separated by the three-rooms

By twenty feet of scrub grass.

I owned this three-by-four feet of space.

This was my building for years.

Until it disappeared,

And four-by-six feet of warmth

And comfort

Was brought into my house on Ice Plant Hill.

We now share special,

Porcelain-endowed, spacious rooms, indoors.

We now, in comfort and privilege

With time on our hands,

Devote ourselves to wondering who

Used these special places before us,

Who occupies them with us now,

And whether or not these imagined people

Are worthy of us.

They scare us, these imaginary people,

More than the flies and snakes,

The ice and snow,

That used to greet us each morning

In the building that sat outside in the cold.

Lying Again, Again

I did a blog post on April 10, 2012 called “We are Lyin’: Are we Dyin’?”.   This is an update of that 2012 post.

In 1978, Sissela Bok published a book, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.  On page 19 of the Vintage paperback sitting on my desk, Ms. Bok invites us to:

“Imagine a society, no matter how ideal in other respects, where word and gesture could never be counted upon.”

I do believe that, in politics at least, we are there. In 2016, politicians have become brazen about lying—saying things they know are lies, knowing that people will know that they are lies, and knowing that people won’t care because they expect to be lied to. So as long as the lies reflect what people want to believe, the lying politician will win votes. It is happening today. When caught in a lie, they lie about having lied, win more votes, and are praised for “telling it like it is”.

In fact, in 2016 not a small number of people are asking politicians to lie to us. The larger the lie,  the more we support them. Evidence, the 2016 GOP primaries.

We have actually codified the legitimacy of lying. Evidence:  (1) As a result of U.S. vs. Alvarez, I may lie with impunity about my war record (sic); (2) This week, an Ohio law that prohibited false statements about a candidate for office bit the dust. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6^th Circuit stuck it down, using the Supreme Court’s money-is-free-speech decision to support their decision.

And we just elected a man whose lies are documented, blatant, and loved by his followers. He in turn has chosen an expert in propaganda as his chief advisor.

Lies are now legally considered a part of self-expression, politicians who lie to us cannot be held legally accountable for those lies, and we the people beg them to tell us bigger and more bodacious lies.

Bok says, again on page 19, “Deceit and violence—these are the two forms of deliberate assault on human beings,” and “society could scarcely function without some degree of truthfulness in speech and action.”

And I again wonder if anyone is grieving for our loss.

Guns again

Another senseless killing involving guns, which have now become religious symbols in the U.S. This killing was "inspired" by another favorite U.S. religion: racism.

So here I go again, re-publishing this same old piece I wrote several years ago.

On hot Saturday afternoons in Kentucky, in the 50s, my sister Betty Zane would give me fifty cents to take my niece Karen Lee by the hand and go “uptown” to the Lido Theatre. Karen and I would watch a few commercials, a cartoon or two, an episode of a serial, like Flash Gordon, and at least one movie—sometimes it was a double feature. Usually the movies were westerns with flashy guns figuring prominently. I lusted after pearl handled toy six shooters.

I remember how I felt when we walked out of the cool, dark theater into the heat and glare of a late afternoon. Surreal and high. In the two or three hours inside, I had become Flash Gordon, Whip Wilson, Lash LaRue, Gene Autry or whoever the hero happened to be. Being the older uncle (I was maybe 9), I kept these feelings to myself as Karen and I walked home. When I got home, though, I’d head for the woods with my imagination for a horse and fingers for guns and kill the bad guys or Indians with the appropriate gun sounds and death sounds coming out of my mouth. I was transported into another reality, and I enjoyed it a lot.

As I got older, I enjoyed driving nails from as far away as possible with my daddy’s .22.

The only part of the Army’s basic training that I enjoyed was the rifle range. The M-16 was light weight and accurate and fun to fire. I was good at it. I have a medal to prove it.

Guns, real and imagined, have been a part of my experience all my life. I currently own several real ones; fewer imaginary ones as time passes.

In 1992, my son was a precocious 16-year-old student in a small (300 student) private college tucked away in the woods of Western Massachusetts. Christmas was approaching. One of his fellow students bought an assault rifle and ammunition and killed a professor and a student and wounded others. Luck (or God or fate or Karma or….) intervened on my family’s part and he was not physically injured. We still deal with it psychologically.

Every time there is a new tragedy involving a school or mall or street corner, or whatever, it gets dragged out again.  The incidences are increasing. Blame is placed at everyone, except for one major U.S. group, who manages to shape public policy, using fear and money.

As I sit in Colorado on a cold December day, I wonder why:

1.     We pledge allegiance to the flag “and to the Republic for which it stands,” BUT

2.     We believe that our founders believed that the elected “government” of this Republic might someday take our guns away and subjugate us

3.     We, therefore, believe we have the right to own as many guns of whatever kind as we want—not the smart bombs, drone planes, tanks, and dirty weapons owned by our “government”, but GUNS—with which to protect ourselves from the smart bombs, drones, tanks, and dirty weapons our government might throw at us in order to subjugate us

4.     Our elected representatives (those same government people who might come after us one day) pledge allegiance to The National Rifle Association to act on our behalf against the government that we fear is going to enslave us—themselves

5.     The NRA (the largest lobbying group in the country) collects boatloads of money from us, which they use to support those representatives (the people who might subjugate us) in their continued reelections.

I admit I’m not all that smart, but I wonder where the logic and reason went. "Guns don't kill, people do." "God (via the first amendment brought down from the mountain) gave me the right to bear arms." 

Think about that. I wonder if people would worship the same mantra if it read:

1. Atomic bombs don't kill, people do
2. I have the God-given right to bear arms
3. By all definitions, the A-bomb is "arms"
4. Therefore I have the God-given right to my own bomb

I find myself feeling that same sense of the surreal I felt leaving the Lido Theater all those years ago. Without the high.

I make no judgment about my friends who continue to hunt, shoot for sport, collect, and love guns. God bless you.

But I do hold some ill will toward the NRA (not the rank and file, but the “NRA government” that controls the organization). I also hold ill will toward cowardly politicians who support the NRA government over that of the U.S, and pass laws that fly in the face of reason, humanity, and love of country, in the name of guns.

I wonder if these people think I’m calling them ignorant and un-American.

I sure hope so.

Search for Decoder Rings

In the mid-1950s I was very active in the Methodist Church in my hometown in Kentucky. It was the hub of my social life and provided some grounding for me as I tried to figure out who and what I was.

In college in 1962, the Wesley Foundation, also affiliated with Methodist Church, became the hub of my social life. The grounding shifted. I started reading at Tillich and Kierkegaard and Bonheoffer and their ilk as a result of my involvement with the Wesley Foundation. I say “read at” because I was not equipped to read and understand these guys, but it seemed they had important things to say so I kept plugging away at them. I also got tuned into Hoffer as well as the beginnings of liberation theology and social justice.

Meanwhile, in my Freshman English classes I started reading at Transcendentalists and Existentialists, and going to movies that I did not understand. I did understand that they held messages that, if I could decode them, would be important.

I also spent some time in college reading at the Bible (not in Aramaic or Hebrew of course—I did not have the languages), knowing there were messages there as well, if I could decode them.

Several of my friends, the ones who weren’t majoring in philosophy or accounting, were looking into Divinity School, so I learned about Vanderbilt, The University of Chicago, and the crown jewel of the genre, as determined by the elite of Western Kentucky State College, Yale.

Since college I have read at other philosophers, the Qur’an (not in Aramaic of course), Zen, Taoism, and such, looking for codes, or at least decoder rings, while fantasizing about spending a year studying things mystical at Chicago, in Kyoto, cruising the Greek Islands, and, most importantly, spending time at Yale.

As the years passed, religion gave up on me. I maintained a belief in a metaphysical power, but its manifestation in temporal organizations created by humans ran counter to my understanding of that power.  In plain English, I fell out of love with the religions created by preachers, priests, and theologians.

I became a management professor in the early 1980s, put aside fantasies of studying the metaphysical through the lenses of the temporal,  and focused my attention on management literature, some of which purported to contain wisdom and answers. The good news was that this literature was easy to read and understand. The bad news is that is was easy to read and understand, and contained no decoder rings.

Last week I spent two days at Yale University’s Divinity School, attending a conference on “Practical Wisdom” as it relates to the application of things spiritual to the practice of management. In attendance were international CEOs and business school faculty and administrators representing fundamentalist Christians, Catholics (including Jesuits and Benedictines), Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, and a couple of Humanists. I served on a panel discussing the notion of “timeless leadership”.

The conference did not last a year, and only involved Yale, not Kyoto, Chicago, or Vanderbilt. But it was Yale.

The really important thing is that this two-day experience tied an earlier me (the searcher of the 1960s) to a more recent me (the management-professor-turned-cynic of the 21^st Century) in some satisfying ways.

There are people over the world, not just theologians and philosophers, but business people and professors as well, who continue to look for decoder rings, to search for meaning in the world into which we have been thrown. This encourages me because I believe that search forms the essence of being human.

In September I will mark 69 years on this earth, this time around at any rate. I wonder how many people live to see pieces of their earliest fantasies, especially those we have discarded, realized in their old age as a part of a pattern. I am worried that most do not. I am giddy about the fact that this kid from Kentucky did.

Sensuality and Weather

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In the late 1950s I sang in the Methodist church choir.  Wednesday night was choir practice night, a night when Tobby Burklow, Edd Hust, Edna Earl Vilines, and others would get together to practice songs for Sunday’s service. I was the youngest singer, and under the tutelage of Tobby Burklow learned to sing church tenor. This was my social life on Wednesday nights.

Choir practice never lasted more than an hour and a half.  But what frequently happened afterward became much more important, and memorable to me over time. The night that greeted me on these nights was inviting and demanded my attention. I remember these winter nights being cold and dark, the air thick with humidity, driving rain and sleet.

In those days my winter coats were never a match for the winters they faced, a result of my lack of money to buy good heavy coats, and my teenage need to look better than I thought cheap weather-efficient coats offered. I also owned one pair of shoes, bought for looks rather than service.

So generally I was not prepared to exchange the warmth of the softly-lit church for the darkness and damp that awaited me.

Rather than being put off by the weather, however, I remember embracing it, being in no hurry to walk home. The rain and sleet caressed my face, dripped off my nose, crept up my pant legs,  and soaked my feet. Shivers greeted my body and joined with the tenor line to “Holy, holy, holy” (number one song in the old Methodist Hymnal) rolling around in my mind.

At my house, when it got dark, my daddy went to bed. When my daddy went to bed, everyone in the house went to bed as well. In the winter, darkness came as early as 5:00. So, when I got home on those cold Wednesday nights my momma and daddy were asleep, the coal stove banked for the night hours earlier, the un-insulated three room house wrapped up on the outside with a coating of ice.

I remember opening the front door as quietly as possible, the task made easier by the fact that we never locked the door. One did not make noise in my house. If Big John were awakened, I was in trouble.

Dripping and shivering, still enjoying the feeling, I would quietly make my way through the living room to the kitchen, where I slept.

We didn’t use sheets when I was growing up. I slept between heavy blankets. My bed sat against a window. I would quietly open the window just an inch or so and slip between the blankets. The sound of the rain outside, but at my fingertips, complemented the experience of my shivers warming the bed, and consequently me, as I lay in my dry warm nest.

This was pure innocent sensuality. And it has shaped me considerably over the years.

I own several pairs of good shoes now and my winter coats are well made for the weather in which I find myself. My house is warm and comfortable. I sleep in a bedroom.

But when it is cold and rainy and dark, as it was one night last week, I will grab a drink and a blanket and go sit on my deck and feel the damp cold creep into my consciousness, welcome the shivers, feel the water drip off my nose, and wallow in my now not-so-innocent sensuality. Occasionally, the tenor line from that first song in the Methodist Hymnal will join me.

I wonder at the early sensual experiences that shape our lives.

Santa Claus

In the early 1950s my father lost his last job in the mines. He was in his early 50s and unable to find work. He picked up odd jobs here and there, and that, plus money my mother earned in a factory, kept a roof over our head (we did have a few holes in the walls and windows) and basic food on the table.

Money was hard to come by.

For several Christmases during that time, around the first of December, my daddy would say, “Well, things are really tight this year; if Santa Claus don’t come, we won’t have Christmas.” He said this seriously. I took him seriously. I was ready to get nothing. It was OK. The Methodist Church provided me the songs and festivities, and the religious trappings were emotionally and spiritually stimulating. I can still smell the pine and candle, and can still feel what it was like to put on white robes and sing Christmas songs with the choir.

My parents did not go to church so we did not share these experiences. My parents did like Christmas, though, and we had a tree, decorated with old trimmings that brought tears to my momma’s eyes as she remembered Christmas with her parents and brothers and sisters and with my two older sisters.

But money was always a problem, and Santa Claus was always seen as the answer to the problem.

Every year, sometime around December 23 or 24, my father would go to Household Finance and borrow money. Every year he’d go to a bootlegger and buy a couple of half-pints of whiskey for his own spirits and our entertainment—I’ll leave that to another day. Every year he’d tell my sister to figure out what it was that I wanted (as well as her two kids, Karen and George), take the HFC money, and go buy the Santa presents, or as close as possible, given money constraints.

It never was much, but I still appreciate the idea, even though I understand that my father spent the next year paying back the money he had borrowed, resulting in him and my momma having to scrimp on other things.

Every year Santa Claus came to my house, and to Karen and George’s house. And it was always magical.

So, I never admitted to “not believing” in Santa Claus until I was about 10 years old.

As these memories come to mind, I’m wondering about Santa Claus.

Last Saturday I attached a pillow around my waist (pillow gets smaller each year), donned the famous red suit, hair, beard, boots, belt, hat, glasses and attitude and went to Zahn Financial Services in Golden, Colorado. I have been Santa there every year for the past five years or so. There are a few kids who have shown up each year, so I’ve watched them grow over that time. Each time I dress in that costume and sit by the decorated tree handing out small gifts, I see the magic expressed in the eyes of the young kids, and the very real desire of the nine and ten year olds to bring back the magic.

I wonder if most of us who grew up as I did have spent their lives trying to recreate the magic brought on by Santa Claus.

I wonder how much money Christian zealots have made trying to convince us that they have the keys to this magic.

And I wonder how much money fathers and mothers have borrowed and spent trying to keep the magic alive.

But mainly, at this time of the year, particularly, even as I wonder about these things, I am grateful to my parents, and my sister, for showing me the magic of Santa Claus, and the gift of giving that embodies  the season of Christmas.

Put the Damn Blog Down and Do Something

When I was a young teenager in the 1950s, I spent a lot of time reading. I was, and still am, an introvert. My daddy would frequently worry about me, and would tell me to “put the damn book down and go do something.”

I have found this to be good advice on several counts, not the least of which is that reading is dangerous. For example, I actually have read Ayn Rand’s novels and articles. They “scared the pee wadding” out of me. Now I see that other people have read her as well and have built empires in this country, having been born-again into her religion. I have read the works of her disciples, leaders in the political arena, and see that they are serious and espouse a philosophy that is absolutely foreign to everything I’ve been taught in books and church during the last 68 years about what it means to be human. That is beyond pee-wadding fear.

Also, I have actually read the Bible (Old and New Testaments in several translations) and, having been in similar situations a time or two, can relate to the acid trip John experiences in his “Revelation”.  But I also have read the writings of the prominent leaders of the Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon religions, and can’t relate to these Christians (sic) who have made careers out of the worship and evangelism of hate, self-aggrandizement, money, and power.

I’ve read too much I think.

The second count upon which I think my daddy’s advice was good is that reading leads to writing, which is even more dangerous. Putting one’s words out into the marketplace of words (I would say ideas, but they are in short supply these days) is to invite either disapproval or condemnation. Or worse yet, promises of “I’ll pray for you”.  Or worst, silence.

I may have written too much.

Of course my father also meant that I should be actively out in the world as opposed to what he saw as being passive—sitting in my back yard reading. At the time I thought this was good advice, so I moved out of the back yard and into church, school, and the world. I was still an introvert, but an engaged one.

I’m heading to Kentucky next week to commemorate my 50^th high school reunion. In a month, I’ll be celebrating my 68^th birthday. In honor of these two events, I’ve decided to once again take my daddy’s advice. This introvert is leaving the back yard of my books and blogs and going back out into the world to do something.

I’ll be back when I have done whatever it is that I will have done.

I wish all y’all peace, love, and the presence of good people in your lives who are not out to shoot you for disagreeing with them (or knocking on their doors, or walking in their gated communities).

And the absence of Ayn Rand evangelists and dangerous Christian fanatics disguised as leaders of the faith.

Rich People and Dirty Boots

My daddy used to frequently remark that you could tell the folks who actually had money from those who wanted to have money but weren’t there yet by listening and looking. If they bragged about their money, they didn’t have any. If they had shit on their boots, they probably had a bit of money, but wouldn’t go round bragging about it. As a kid, I found this observation fascinating and wise.

I’ve been reading the Holy Bible and Aristotle’s The Rhetoric this week, thinking about my daddy, and wondering about rich people.

Where and when I grew up, it seems to me the people who had more money than most of us went to some length not to rub our noses in it. For example, the folks who paid for me to go to summer church camp did it without fanfare.  Christmas baskets were put together for the poor and delivered matter-of-factly and neighborly, without explicit or implicit judgments made toward the giver or receiver.

Of course, we all know what Jesus is noted to have said on the subject of money and wealth—"the love of money is the root of all evils"l (1 Timothy 6:10), and “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Matthew 19:24) remind us of two passages.

Jesus was a kind and gentle soul. Aristotle was not. On most subjects, Aristotle, most certainly not a Christian (Christianity had not been founded yet), held positions that were about as far away from Jesus’ as could be. However, in The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, as he talks about what one needs to know about wealthy people in order to persuade them, what he has to say is strong:

Wealthy men are insolent and arrogant; their possession of wealth affects their understanding; they feel as if they had every good thing that exists; wealth becomes a sort of standard of value for everything else, and therefore there is nothing it can’t buy.… Rich men also consider themselves worthy to hold public office; for they consider they already have the things that give them a claim to office. In a word, the type of character produced by wealth is that of a prosperous fool. There is indeed one difference between the type of the newly-enriched and those who have long been rich: the newly-enriched have all the bad qualities mentioned in an exaggerated and worse form—to be newly-enriched means, so to speak, no education in riches. The wrongs they do other are not meant to injure their victims, but spring from insolence or self-indulgence, e.g., those that end in assault or in adultery. (pp.127-28)

The people of means that I remember in Providence, Kentucky, those from “old money” and from “new money” did not fit Aristotle’s description. For that I am thankful.

But I sure as hell see evidence to support his view today in the U.S.

Despite our Western Cultural religious and philosophical traditions and underpinnings, I wonder what happened to us, and why it is that today we have come to worship wealth and wealthy people? Especially when they flaunt their wealth and rub our noses in it.

I hear rich folks bragging about their money and possessions, but despite my best attempts to find it, I ain’t seen no shit on any of their boots yet.

Wonder if today’s world is making Aristotle look like an even more brilliant man.

And making my daddy’s wisdom obsolete.

Raccoons and Conflict Management: A Case Study

It was Two A.M. on a dark morning in suburban Denver. I had been in conflict with a family of five raccoons. In formal conflict management terminology, what we had was a conflict of needs. They needed my plums. I needed them to be gone. I tried reasoning with them: “When you eat my plums, I feel put upon, because they are my plums and you steal them”.

This had not worked. So, on this dark morning, I heard them chirping away with that happy, full-bellied chirp for which they are notorious.

I live next to a large piece of open space, thriving with foxes, coyotes, owls, geese, hawks, exotic water birds passing through, AND RACCOONS. The law is clear. Humans may not kill these residents. We may harass them, however, if they invade our tax-paid pieces of property and irritate us. 

The point needs to be made: I like raccoons. They are intelligent, playful (mostly), industrious, family-values kinds of animals. They are also not aggressive, unless rabid or cornered. I thought.

They also taste good, if cooked by Danny “Stick” and/or Tanya Thomason. Stick has passed away and Tanya lives in Kentucky, so even if I broke the law it would be a waste.

But on this morning I had had enough. I jumped out of bed and crept down the stairs, careful not to wake my cat—he’s a grumpy SOB when awakened—and grabbed my weapon of choice. What I figured was that the sight of me sans pants, shirt, or toupee, holding my trusty Daisy-Red-Ryder-BB gun-with-the-compass-on-the-stock would cause this family sufficient harassment as to cause them to go elsewhere.

With gun and flashlight in hand, I crept onto the deck. Neighbors were all asleep, or light-less anyway. I saw a big raccoon in the tree and shot three shots. At least two offended him enough that he scampered down. Noise of others following suit caused me pause, but I just kept cocking and shooting at large objects in the tree, and bright eyes lit by my flashlight, then at large objects and eyes on the deck.

Then the large objects disappeared. The raccoons were now under the deck.

OK, now what? I had visions of little hand-like claws reaching up through the deck cracks to get at my toes, but brave Kentucky hunter that I am, I stood my ground, quietly, with toes upturned.

Then, at the end of my flashlight’s beam I saw five raccoons. A little chill went up my spine. My deck sets close to the ground. The raccoons were standing on this ground, so what I really saw was five pairs of eyes and five pairs of front paws gripping the edge of the deck. The five had spread out down the short side of the deck, and around the corner onto the long side. Yes, these non-aggressive family-values animals were trying to surround me. They seemed pissed, and poised to take care of this plum-eating-interruptus-fool.

I quickly cocked and shot as fast as I could, expecting the worst, and escaped through the sliding doors back into the safety of my suburban middle class home.

I wonder if my daddy, Stick, Tanya, and my Kentucky hunting friends, and their hounds, are laughing. I know I heard what sounded like laughter from my deck, through the plate glass, as I reached for a shot of bourbon to calm my nerves.

In conflict management theory, conflicts of needs may be resolved when one party’s needs are shown to be more important than the other’s. It was clear to me in this instance who’s needs were greatest.

I don’t like conflict.