I got an email called "Quite an Analogy" forwarded on by somebody I respect and it made me so mad. It said we should stop providing housing assistance, emergency medical care and free schools. Because if we did that all the immigrants would go away and life would be better for us. No crowding, no mess. (It was comparing it to the fact that if you put on bird feeders, the birds come and make a mess and pester you for food. Take down the bird feeders, the birds go away and the mess is solved.)
Let me see, if I stopped feeding my kids, they’d probably go away sooner or later and the house would sure be cleaner and quieter. Or to make the analogy more accurate, that if the neighbor kids started coming over for food, I should stop feeding the neighbor kids and my kids, so that the neighbor kids (never mind what would happen to mine) would go away. What kind of reasoning is that?? And it obviously resonates with people – someone forwarded it to me.
If you want the problem to go away, you need to look at why you have the problem. It’s not because you put out the bird feeder. If the emergency rooms are crowded, it’s not because you offer emergency care to everyone, it’s because some people had no where else to go. Figure out why they don’t have family doctors and help them get them. It has to be easier and cheaper for them and the emergency rooms to provide care for them some other way. Personally, I like that the courts have constantly up held our right to emergency care regardless of proof of insurance.
I think people that want to get rid of the bird feeder are just plain lazy. They aren’t willing to really figure out why we have this problem. This isn’t the immigrants’ problem. It’s our problem. We have to fix it. Getting rid of the bird feeder will just change the problem, not solve it.
I take that back. Getting rid of the bird feeder, if it meant lowering our standard of living to that of Mexico, might solve the problem. If life was as bad here as there, maybe they wouldn’t come. If I stop feeding my kids, the neighbor kids will stop coming over for dinner.
Seth Godin gives the perfect example with Acumen. Acumen is a non profit that wants to invest in third world companies that sell affordable products to people in developing countries – it’s the best way to help their economies grow. However, traditional philanthropists don’t want to hear that the way they’ve been doing it is wrong – and traditional investors don’t care that the company they are investing in is in a developing country as long as it makes them money. So Acumen had to tell a different story and reach out to a different market: those philanthropists that are not happy with the way things currently work. 
because it made perfect sense – the book described weightloss just like I thought about weightloss. Her response was "You liked it because you agreed with it?" And I was like, "yes!" And she decided I was full of myself. But Seth Godin says we all only hear and like what we agree with. And I knew that from all the way back in eighth grade – I just didn’t know how to explain it.
, the graphic movie about a Grecian king who is greatly outnumbered by the Persians, is the number one best seller on Amazon and it just released on DVD the day before yesterday. (And we owned our copy the day before yesterday.) 
wasn’t bad because it looked like a comic but it wasn’t any better because it looked like a comic.
is a beautiful book about teaching kids to swim. It has great pictures, step by step instructions, and games and techniques for teaching your children how to swim. I especially liked the fact that it very clearly stated what children can learn at each stage. So Caleb is now old enough to be learning how to hold his breath. (He’s 11 months old.) They not only said he can learn how to hold his breath, but explained how to teach him and what to watch for to see if he’s comfortable with it or we need to take some more time. I now have a very clear guide of what I can work on with him and what I might want to wait a bit on.