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Showing posts from September, 2014

Historical Relativism Regarding 9-11

Perhaps it is just that this year has been especially stressful; or that the news has been rampant with killings and mass murders and beheadings and speculation. But I have been more preoccupied during the last couple weeks than I have in a very long time, and it came to a climax today, September 11, 2014. Last night I was watching a movie on cable and my husband and dog were on the floor of our family room sleeping soundly and blissfully resting. I was staring at both and beginning to feel the personal ritual that plays in my head every year feeling more and more intense. In 2001, I awoke in my Midtown apartment near the United Nations on Manhattan's East Side to a phone call from a lovely woman named Michelle who worked with my husband at the time. “Hello?” I said. “Turn on your TV!” she replied. I found the remote and did just that and found MSNBC just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center (WTC). “Hello?” I said again; however the line had gone dead. At

It Is Impossible For Your Platoon to Be Effective if They Don’t All Absolutely Believe Their Sergeant Would Never Shoot Them in the Back

I have spent the last ten years living two professional lives simultaneously. The first is working for a federal agency and being branded a pariah. The agency leaders and contemporaries outside of my immediate department valued and appreciated my work and who I was. My immediate department’s fundamental nature was hostile. No matter how much effort I made or how much I created  or  produced, middle management made deliberate choices to devalue the work I did and consciously undermine me professionally to peers, clients and management. Fortunately, the second life I lived concurrently was through voluntarily supporting an agency that has continuously mentored me and trained me and trusted me to develop into the leader, spokesperson and advocate I now am. That may sound like an unlikely combination, but it is primarily caused by the anomaly that effective management implies controlling your team rather than cultivating your team. When a few months ago, I finally got my courage up to b