Welcome to this Sunday’s Third Degree: Tough, Brief, Weekly Interrogations on matters public and private that force thinking and response. Today we target: Outcomes

  • Have Lucas, Spielberg and Harrison Ford dialed it up again?
  • Does the final Indiana Jones movie provide stimulating and satisfying outcomes to movie lovers?
  • Is the questing for control over the space-time continuum compelling when matched with familiar and ingratiating, “Indy” idiosyncrasies and escapades?
  • Movie aside, is there longing for a personal, a national, or even a world, dial of destiny?
  • With whom would we, should we, trust with such power?
  • Do current American politics provide an answer?
  • What’s more scary— politics or creepy crawlies in the hair and snakes underfoot?
  • Is the outcome a tie or not even close?
  • Do you/we try to twist our own dials of interdependent destinies?
  • Why are the outcomes are so hard to predict or control?
  • Is trying to do too much or too good rejected, or abused, by implacable human nature?
  • Does the indifference of living a debilitating or a drug centric existence contribute to outrageous outcomes?
  • Can we dial up a desired destiny in the life of those who don’t want it or, apparently, need it? Should we even try?
  • Is it an acceptable outcome to recognize that there will be losses in the combat operation of life, knowing as Lenin suggests: “Life is struggle?”
  • At what point, if positive outcomes are not achieved, should losses be accepted?
  • At what point should policies and programs be cut or eliminated?
  • Why are those evaluations and actions hard to accept?
  • Whose destinies are we dialing anyway and what outcomes matter?
  • Can a more omnibus, Adam Smith, invisible hand of self interest integrated across a free society be the way to go?
  • So, to the adventuresome themes of John Williams, do we march on or wring hands and dither? Onward to outcomes?

Socrates reminds: “The unexamined life is not worth living”. The answers and actions are yours?

 

John Borling, Major General, USAF-ret, is a highly decorated fighter pilot who served worldwide in high level command and staff positions. He was a POW in Hanoi for over 6 1/2 years. Now active in business and civic affairs, see/subscribe: www.third-degreeUS.com