Anyway, because of all the fuss about “dangerous” Mormons, I think it is probably worthwhile to point out that Mormons, also, will be voting for the person they feel best represents their views, not the person who happens to be of the same religion.  This specifically applies to me, and unless Romney changes his platform, I won’t be voting for him.

I’ll tell you why.  Interestingly, my reasons are based very specifically on Mormon beliefs, primarily from the Book of Mormon which I happen to regard as scripture like the Bible.  I realize that people reading this post may disagree on that, or may not even believe in God at all.  That’s fine with me.  I’m not going to be teaching doctrine here, just recalling some anecdotes from the Book of Mormon.

For nearly ten years now we’ve been involved in a war on terror.  We’ve invaded a number of sovereign nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya in order to fight this war.  Our goal has been to eradicate Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization our government has blamed for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.  Since the war began, there have been roughly twice the number of American lives lost in fighting the war as were lost on the day of the terrorist attacks.  Put another way, over the past ten years it has been more likely for an American to die fighting terrorists than from a terrorist attack itself.

In Book of Mormon times, a group existed for decades that caused similar problems to the mainstream public.  This group would hide in the hills and wilderness, occasionally sneaking into the cities to create mayhem.  Often the purpose was to assassinate government officials or other high-profile individuals.  They would also terrorize the public, steal food and supplies, or simply recruit (or intimidate or coerce) others into joining with them.  Many of the members of this group lived covertly among the mainstream public within the cities themselves, coordinating with the rest of the group in secret and facilitating the group in carrying out their aims.

Sound familiar?  It should.  Was this a terrorist group?  Well, the people were certainly terrified.  It was certainly a goal of this group to create that feeling of terror and to drive  people into joining out of fear of the alternative.  This group sounds much like how we define terrorist groups today.

So the million dollar question is this:  How did the people back then deal with this terrorist group?

Answer:  Poorly.

A few different approaches were tried.  The people tried to infiltrate the group, sending in their own spies, executing those they caught, etc.  This approach was tried over the course of years but it had very little effect.  In fact, no approach had any real impact at all unless it also involved radical, gut-wrenching change within the mainstream public also.

After a while, the people began fighting so intently with the terrorist organization that it became pretty all-consuming.  The prophet of the time asked God to send a famine, thinking that it would be better for people to become humbled by famine than to continue with the violence.  The famine continued for over three years.  By the end of the famine, all of the members of the terrorist organization were dead.

How many years of peace before the terrorist organization resurfaced?  Four years.

Things got bad again.  So bad, in fact, that the leader of the terrorist organization announced his intent to invade and take over the entire country.  The country’s leaders refused to surrender.  Instead, the leaders asked all of the people in the entire country to move to a single, central location where they could concentrate all of the strength of the people against the terrorist group.  Thousand and thousands of people lost their homes and farms and livelihoods as they relocated to the center of the country.  The terrorist group destroyed cities, farms, and roads as they made their way to the center of the country, but ultimately after a great war the people prevailed as the terrorist organization was wiped out.

After a four year war, extensive destruction, and the loss of tens upon tens of thousands of lives on both sides, how many years of peace before the terrorist organization resurfaced?  This time it was better:  A whopping eight years.  But it wasn’t long until the terrorist group was operating in full swing again.

Mormons believe that after Jesus Christ was crucified and resurrected, he appeared to the people in America (we believe this is what he meant when he said “other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice” (John 10:16)).  The Book of Mormon describes that in the days between when Christ was crucified and when he was resurrected, there was horrible, massive destruction across the face of the entire land in America.  This destruction killed all of the members of this terrorist group and many others.  But this destruction alone didn’t end the reign of terror.  It was the visit of Christ, which brought about a deep and complete change in all of the surviving people, which ended the reign of terror in the land.

In other words, it was only when people preferred righteousness to wickedness that they were successful in eradicating the terrorist group for any length of time.  This time, it was over 200 years before the group appeared again.

I don’t necessarily expect you to believe this account, especially if you aren’t Mormon.  But Mitt Romney is a Mormon, and he should believe it.  He should know that our current approach to ridding the world of terror is NEVER going to work.

You may not like it — my guess is most Americans don’t, and sometimes even I don’t like it myself — but the only way to rid the world of terror in any meaningful and enduring way is to choose righteousness over wickedness.  We can’t decide to tolerate some wickedness, like extramarital sex, or pornography, or “legal” but dishonest business relations, and yet aspire to rid the world of those who sin differently.  Evil escalates to greater evil, such that even small indiscretions start us toward a path that ends in murder, violence, and war unless we take steps to reverse the path.  Sorry, bud.  That is the way it goes.

Mitt Romney should know this.  We should be getting out of the war and bringing our troops home immediately.  We are fighting a fight that cannot be won, and the fighting of this fight is only making things worse.

When Al-Qaeda attacked on 9/11, everyone asked the wrong question, which basically amounted to figuring out how to get vengeance.  But exacting vengeance is always an evil-minded endeavor, even if done legally.  Even seeking “justice” in this case is misguided.  According to Wikipedia, current counts range between about 75,000 to 1,176,000 citizens of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan that have been killed in the conflict.  How many are required to obtain justice for the 3000 who died on 9/11?

The question we should have been asking ourselves is:  Could we have done anything to prevent this?  I seem to recall Osama bin Laden referring to the USA as an “infidel nation.”  Here’s some synonyms of infidel:  heathen, heretic, profane, immoral, crude, foul, obscene, sinful, wicked.  Seems an apt description to me.  Would the attacks have taken place if the American public, as a whole, were better described as moral, ethical, trustworthy, and honest?

I’m looking for a presidential candidate who recognizes this war as the very expensive temper tantrum it is and who will end it as soon as possible.  I’m looking for a presidential candidate who has the courage to stand in front of the country and tell us that we are wrong, that we are behaving wrongly, that the terrible predicaments we are finding ourselves in is a result of our own prideful, selfish, and evil choices, and that the only way out is to sacrifice and return to be a more noble, kind, honest, and humble people.

Sorry Mitt, but you aren’t the guy.

(I’m not 100% sure he reads my blog, but you never know…)

It was some time after we’d shipped Novell Forge.  Multiple attempts to expand the scope and vision of Novell Forge had been thwarted when I’d repeatedly failed to make a good enough case to invest further in it.  The Developer Services organization was growing smaller and smaller, through layoff and attrition — Novell, sadly, never really did understand the need to invest in their developer community.  I’d been reassigned to a new team from a boss I really liked, and had been given what seemed like a busywork assignment.

I used to joke back then that I could prove I was the least important employee at Novell.  First, organizationally:  Developer Services was surely the most underappreciated and least important organization in all of Novell, and of all the assignments in our organization, mine was the lowest priority assignment.  This part I’d actually confirmed with my management, who had presented a slide deck with our ongoing objectives listed on one slide and those we’d rejected on a subsequent slide.  I’d verified that the first slide listed the accepted objectives in priority order, and my assignment was last.

Second, geographically:  You could (jokingly, of course) judge an employee’s importance by a) how close their building was to campus center, b) what floor they were on (higher floors being more important), and c) how close their office was to the corners and edges of the building (corners, then outside walls, being more important).  Since my office was the ONLY office not on an outside wall on the bottom floor of the building farthest from campus center, I’d joke that this also proved I was the least important person at Novell.

So I joked about it, but also wondered most days whether it really mattered if I came to work at all.  Did anyone care if I showed up?  Did anyone care if I left early?  Did anyone care if I actually accomplished anything during the day?  Did my assignment really matter at all?

I kinda wallowed around in this mire for some time, still coming to work and going through the motions, but wallowing anyway.  I thought about leaving Novell but nothing really materialized.  I’d heard all my life that you should love your job; shouldn’t I be finding a place to work that I loved?

Then one day it finally hit me:  Instead, shouldn’t I be loving the job I have?

I realized that, regardless of the importance of my work to the company, I could make it important to myself.  I vowed that I would take a lot more pride in my work, that I would try to deliver software of high quality and craftsmanship regardless of the assignment I was given, and that I would find other ways to get involved.  I started delivering better on my project.  I created a new technology.  I worked with some great guys at Red Hat to start a new Eclipse subproject.  I got involved with Novell’s Software Development Community of Practice and eventually became one of the practice leaders and one of Novell’s primary thought-leaders and bloggers around agile development methodologies.  I enjoyed my job much more and got an opportunity to move to a different team, a product development team, comprised of some great individuals whom I would never have gotten to know otherwise.

I’ve just finished reading Hugh MacLeod’s book “Evil Plans.”  One of the key phrases in that book is:  ”Life is too short not to do something that matters.”

I’ve been thinking about this and about me and my past and about tidbits I get from conversations with friends and things I pick up on Twitter and Facebook.  How many of us wake up every day with the sole goal of getting to the end of the day?  Every day?

What is it you are looking forward to?

When you wake up in the morning, are you most looking forward to about 16 hours from now, when you can go back to bed?  Or the time when the kids are finally asleep?

When you head in to work, are you most looking forward to noon, when you can take a break from work for an hour?  Or five o’clock, when it is time to go home?  Or the weekend?  Or summer vacation?

Isn’t that a waste, to spend so many hours of the day waiting for them to be past?

I realize that not all of us have our dream job.  But, as I learned, instead of yearning for your dream job and lamenting all the ways that your current job isn’t your dream job, you can also decide to love the job you currently have.  You can give more than you are currently giving — not more time, necessarily, but more heart, more care, more passion.  If you are a schoolteacher, you can yearn for summer vacation and lament those kids you have to put up with for such a low salary until then, or you can ignore the voices telling you how poorly you are paid and decide to make a difference in the lives of as many of your students as possible, a real difference, and find fulfillment in being the best in your profession.

And if you can do that with your job, if you can choose to love your current job instead of waiting until your dream job finds you, can’t you also do that with your life?  Can’t you also take the approach of choosing to give more heart and passion and care and love to the life you have instead of waiting for the life you want to come and find you?

The funny thing is, in my experience I found that as I gave more to my job, it started to become more like the job I wanted.  Things started to happen in my favor.  Opportunities came up that weren’t coming up before.

I’ve found this on other occasions as well.  At times when my career wasn’t heading quite where I wanted, choosing to care more and give more seems to get things moving again.  Things just start happening when you do that, somehow.

The best part, however, is that you have more days that are meaningful.  Each day is a day to give and add value and feel important.  You find meaning in your life every day when you stop worrying about all the things that aren’t working out for you and start finding ways to give.

Enjoy your job more by giving more of yourself at work.  Gain better friends by seeking opportunities to be a better friend.  Take time to read a book to your child, or play with the trains or Polly Pockets, or watch “Tangled” again even though you watched it yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, because they will not be little for long.

Make your days meaningful and live every day.  Don’t spend your days waiting for your dream life to happen to you.  You deserve better than that.

Recently in The Register, Jon Bon Jovi was quoted in an interview saying, “Steve Jobs is personally responsible for killing the music business.”  The quote immediately reeks of the same stuff as the other spewage common of 70′s and 80′s era artists who are still around today.

Reading further into the article is advised so you won’t hate on Jon Bon too much.  The experience he’s really talking about here is that of a teenage kid traipsing down to the music store, dropping their hard-earned cash (at minimum wage, likely) on an album where they’ve only heard one song, or maybe none at all, then taking it home and experiencing the whole thing from end to end as an atomic unit.

It’s a story I’m very familiar with.  I don’t even want to think about how much money I blew on music in high school.  Today, when I listen to my old music, I insist on listening to it in album order, almost all the time.  I can see Jonny Boy’s point here — even if you are paying for the music, there’s something from the experience that is lost by not experiencing the album as it was conceptualized by the artists who created it.  I remember the first time I heard Def Leppard’s “Hysteria” album, cover to cover, at a friend’s house, when it was brand new.  There’s something about the album as a whole, the way the songs are sequenced, that makes it better as a unit than the sum of the parts.  My first comment to my friend was, “That album is going to be a classic.”  Sure enough, over 20 years later I still listen to it all the time.

It isn’t that JBJ is wrong about what the experience has lost.  It’s that his blame is misplaced.  It isn’t Steve Jobs’ fault.  It is the music industry’s fault.

Back in the late 70′s to about the mid 80′s, bands formed organically.  Guys (girls too, sometimes) like Eddie Van Halen would spend every waking moment teaching themselves to play their brother’s electric guitar while he was delivering newspapers.  They would form garage bands, then the more serious of them would form backyard party bands, and maybe start performing on the Sunset Strip, where one night Gene Simmons or someone like that might be in the audience and would offer to help them get recorded.  They would scrounge all the money together they could and record an album.  They’d send it off to a label who would agree to distribute it.  Only after an album was successful (or sometimes more than one) would they get a contract with a label.  All this time they’d written their own songs, often for years before they ever performed at the Whiskey A Go-Go.  They already knew which ones were popular, which ones sounded right, before they ever stepped into the studio.

Sometime in the 80′s, someone had a boneheaded idea:  ”Hey, why require artists to actually go through all of that?  We could short-circuit the whole process by hiring songwriters, hiring studio musicians to record, and holding auditions for attractive people who know how to sing!”  Before you knew it, people who had not gone through the wringer were getting record deals too.  But since the “artists” weren’t doing all the work anymore, the labels were keeping all the money and writing entirely self-serving contracts.  This made things that much worse for the organic bands, who didn’t deserve to be treated like their music-of-mass-production counterparts.

Before long, you had entire albums filled up mostly with filler garbage but featuring a couple of popular singles.  People would go purchase the album, as Bon Jovi described above, but be pretty disappointed with the album as a whole even if they liked the singles okay.  In addition, they found that even though the singles were catchy enough to get them to buy the album, they lacked substance and got old quickly.

In other words, there was a clear shift from albums as a collection of art to albums as an assemblage of mostly trash with some items disguised as art, but lacking in the depth and substance to truly become art.  Yet the music industry was charging just as much for these new-age albums as they used to charge for the classics-in-infancy.

It was around this time, the late 80′s into the 90′s, where I and most of my friends began saying, “I sure wish there was a way to just pay for the songs I want.”

So, Jon, don’t blame Steve Jobs.  If you want to blame someone, blame Tiffany.  She’s one of the first I remember that followed this formula which ultimately doomed the rest of you.

Proactivity might be one of the most misunderstood and abused terms in business today and over the past decade.  As it is described in Covey’s “7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, it is a powerful principle that enables a person to realize they are truly in control of their own life and that it is up to them to make their life what they want of it.  As it is used in business, however, it is a catch-all used by management to lay blame at the feet of individual contributors.  For as much as business people use the term, it is surprising to see how poorly they really understand it.

(I believe Scott Adams would agree with me; hence the cartoon above.)

I’ve been told countless times in a business context that I need to be “more proactive.”  One of the champions of this was IBM.  I was hired by IBM in April of 1998 to port a server application from a mainframe to an RS6000 UNIX platform.  Funny thing was, once I started I found out something kinda funny:  My team didn’t have access to a UNIX machine for me to program on, and didn’t have budget to buy one.  I spent the better part of that year prototyping the code on my Windows laptop, hoping it would work on a UNIX machine, along with searching throughout the site for groups with unused UNIX workstations that I could repurpose for my needs.  It took several months before I finally found a refurbished RS6000 machine that we could afford and was able to arrange to have it shipped to Boulder where I worked.  Finally I had the right equipment to do the job I had been hired for many months before.

At my annual review, I was a bit surprised to hear in my feedback that the company was disappointed in the work I’d done.  Given the constraints on budget and purchasing, and given my organization’s complete lack of any knowledge whatsoever as to how to even acquire the hardware I needed, I felt I’d done a pretty good job of finding what we needed to move forward.  Instead, my feedback was that I hadn’t made nearly the progress on the code that they had hoped for.

When I pointed out to them, “But, you failed to provide me the equipment I needed to produce this code,” their response was, “Well, you need to be more proactive.”

I heard it then and I’ve heard it a lot since.

Last week after we exited the freeway where there was no exit ramp, I thought about this a lot for a good 24 hours or so.  I felt horrible about what had happened.  I felt bad for what had happened to the car, bad for frightening my son, bad for nearly having a serious accident.  I thought over and over about all the things I could have done differently.  Most dominant in my mind was this:  I could have assumed that the driver of the other car would suddenly move over into my lane and cut me off and force me off the road.  I could have assumed that he would not see me there.  I could have passed at a different spot on the freeway.  I could have …, I could have …, I could have …

Then I suddenly realized:  No, Matt.  No.  When a person is driving, it is THEIR responsibility to make a safe lane change.  I was established in my lane.  The other driver did not make a safe lane change.  It was his fault.  Not mine.  His.

I realized that I’ve been trained to feel responsible for things that are not my fault.  I’ve been trained to feel guilty when something I’m associated with goes poorly, as though I am automatically responsible for the success or failure of anything with which I have any association.

Fact is, this is just simply not true.  Proactivity means to accept responsibility for those things which are your responsibility, and to take it upon yourself to take action, make the best of things, and improve your life and those around you, true.  But it doesn’t mean that you accept blame or feel guilty for things you are not responsible for.

If, heaven forbid, one of my children were to start using drugs, I would feel terribly about that.  I would examine the situation and do everything in my power to help change the situation, to support their attempts to quit, to get them the help they need, whatever.  That is being proactive.  But I would not take the blame for their choice.  My children know that it is wrong to use drugs.  They’ve been taught.  They ultimately have a right to choose, and I don’t have to accept full responsibility for their choices in order to be a proactive person.

The driver of the red car made an unsafe lane change.  Can I drive more defensively in the future?  Sure.  Can I do a better job of assuming the person I’m passing doesn’t know I’m there?  Yes.  Is my accident last year my fault?  No.  No it is not.  And I’m not going to waste another second of my life feeling guilty about something that isn’t my fault.

I’ve raved before about “7 Habits” and, without question, I’m a Covey disciple.  Proactivity is a key guiding principle of my life.  But sometimes, it isn’t my fault.

It was in 2003, when I was at Novell and was vigorously championing an open source strategy, that Novell acquired Ximian.  Since I worked in Developer Services it wasn’t long before we engaged in conversations with Miguel de Icaza, one of the founders of Ximian and the driving force behind the Mono project, the premier open-source C#/.NET implementation.  Since that time Miguel and I have kept somewhat in touch, or at least we have some vague awareness of each other.  It isn’t like we hang out or anything, but we have a friendlike relationship.

Since that time when we first met, I’ve given a lot of thought to Miguel and the career he’s created for himself.  I noticed, for example, that when Novell acquired Ximian (or sometime thereafter), Miguel was given a vice-president role — specifically, a role that did not exist within Novell at all prior to the acquisition.  I marveled how, due to his affiliation with Mono, Miguel was virtually un-fireable.  Even if he were to get “fired,” he would continue to be affiliated with Mono, would continue to lead the project, and would without doubt soon find employment elsewhere, still leading the Mono project.  I’ve found it interesting to think that, if Miguel and I were to both attend Microsoft’s Professional Developer’s Conference, he would be having lunch with Microsoft executive VPs (I know this because I know he has done so in the past), while I would be sitting anonymously at some table in the cafeteria.  Yet I’m the one who works for Microsoft, not Miguel.

This is all the more interesting since it appears that Miguel didn’t strategically set out to put himself into this position.  Rather, it seems that he simply set out to do interesting and valuable work and trusted to karma to see what would come of it.  It seemed that, over time, the effort he made to create value caused money and opportunity to naturally gravitate toward him.

This leads us to the “Money Flow Principle,” which is simply this:  Money eventually flows toward he who creates value.

The premise is sound and seems to hint of truth, and Miguel’s example of this principle in action is noteworthy.  Perhaps you, like me, have come up with any of a number of ways that you could contribute to society, but you’ve withheld your contributions because you couldn’t figure out how you would be fairly compensated for what you might choose to contribute.  Perhaps you, and I, need to internalize this concept a bit more.

This, by the way, is one of the messages of “Linchpin”, the book by Seth Godin which I wrote about previously.  What gifts do you have to give?  What talents do you have to share?  What contributions do you have to make?  What if you knew you would be well compensated for offering your gift to the world?

Maybe it’s time you stop worrying about whether you will get paid and start worrying about making contributions that are highly valuable, contributions that give you intrinsic fulfillment and help you feel pleased with your place in life.  If my so-called Money Flow Principle holds true, eventually the money will flow towards you.

(By the way, I previously contacted Miguel to let him know I was thinking of writing this blog post.  He was quite gracious and seemed pleased that I would consider it.  Miguel, if you should happen to read this, I simply wish to express thanks for your friendship and example, and I hope the post doesn’t embarrass you.)

When people have something to say, I use that to gauge how well I did at communicating my point of view.  For my previous post, “Outside the In-Crowd”, I can tell from the response that I didn’t do a very good job communicating.  For the record, I want to make it clear that I really do appreciate the responses and the care behind them.  That means a lot to me.  The fact that I didn’t convey my message well is not your fault and it doesn’t make your comments less meaningful.

When I wrote that blog post, I was trying to convey a simple realization that I’d had.  It’s a twofold realization.

The first, er, fold, is as follows:  One of two things happens when you put a group of people together.  Either the group will generally concede to be accepting and interested in everyone, or some subset of the group will work together to elevate themselves by pushing the others down.  I don’t think this is necessarily done consciously or vindictively.  It just IS.

The second part is:  When a subset of the group bands together to elevate itself, the remaining members of the group have an interesting choice.  Being a majority, they can ignore the group trying to elevate itself and choose to be accepting and interested in everyone.  Taking this path disempowers the smaller group trying to elevate itself.  Ironically, most individuals in the majority support the smaller group by trying to get themselves into that group.  This is done by, in turn, pushing down other people.

This happens in junior high and high school, but I found it interesting to note that it doesn’t just happen there.  That’s simply a common thread I used to try to help make the point.

The general reaction I’ve had to this is basically this (okay, I’m exaggerating slightly):  Matt!  Why are you saying this?  I liked you in high school!  I know for a fact that at least some other people did as well!  Just because you could never get a date doesn’t mean you are a loser!  PLEASE DO NOT KILL YOURSELF!!!!!

To which I express my gratitude.  I appreciate your friendship.  My point is, I didn’t write the blog post because I’m insecure about whether I was popular in high school.  I don’t really care about that.  There are, however, a couple of things that I am concerned about:

• I don’t care about popularity in high school now (sheesh, that was, uh, more than 5 years ago), but I did then.  I’m ashamed to admit it but it’s true.  And I fear that I was one of those people on the outside trying to get in by pushing other people down.  I really do worry about this.  I fear and regret what I might have been like and hope I’ve changed.
• Even though I’m older now, and my friends and acquaintances are older now, I’m still seeing this and have been seeing it ever since.  I just now figured out how to make sense of it.  So my concern now is, now that I understand it and can quantify it, am I really changing?  Am I supporting the in-crowds by pushing down others around me in order to conform to the ideals of the in-crowds?  Or am I creating the ideal I would rather have, where people are generally accepting and interested in everyone else?  Do I still care about being accepted by the in-crowd?

See, the thing is, regardless of the context (high school, work, church, etc.), the nature of the in-crowd is the same.  And the appeal of in-crowd membership is entirely dependent on context.  Remove the context, and the appeal is gone.

It’s my hope that we will see this for what it is and disempower the in-crowds around us by simply refusing to give them the support they need from us to survive.  It’s my hope that we will instead work to be accepting and interested in others.  Hey, in a way it is a form of civil disobedience.  Cater to your rebel spirit!  Take a look around you and assess yourself.  I’ll be interested to hear what you have to say.

The reason why this is a point of personal interest is because Reed and I were friends in high school.  Today, for the record (and for context), Reed is a news anchor, filmmaker, and philanthropist.  He’s also anti-Mormon and a homosexual.  And, for my part, a friend.

Reed (Darrin back then) and I were pretty good friends, in fact.  We double-dated for both our Junior and Senior proms and on a number of other occasions.  We were both involved in a show-choir group, Reed for his talent and me because they needed additional men in the group.  He was generally well-liked as far as I can remember, especially by the girls in our high school.  We spent quite a bit of time together; I’m pretty sure I was considered one of his closest friends.

I don’t know if he felt same-gender attraction tendencies when we were in high school.  He never even hinted at this to me.  I’m willing to bet that if he felt this way back then, nobody else knew about it either.

Reed wasn’t really on the inner circle of the popular group of kids.  Neither was I, for that matter.  I can neither confirm nor deny any bullying or mistreatment towards him by other kids in our school.  I never witnessed anything beyond the normal things that the popular kids do to pretty much everyone else, in terms of teasing and belittling and gossip and backbiting.  I’m not aware of anything atypical, and I doubt it could have had anything to do with any same-gender attraction issues since I’m pretty sure nobody knew about it.  (For the record, that doesn’t make it right or acceptable.)

I spent a lot of time in Reed’s home when we were growing up.  I knew his mother and father and siblings.  I could not speak to the level of family functionality or dysfunctionality; from my view it seemed like a normal family.  Reed was raised a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) as was I.  He was not particularly active in our church while we were growing up, but later decided to become active and eventually chose to serve an LDS mission in Texas.

Reed was over 20 years old when he decided to serve a mission.  Most young LDS men leave on their mission at 19; by 20 if a young man hasn’t gone most people tend to think he’s decided not to go.  I say this to point out that by about 20 the pressure is off.  Reed made this choice on his own.

After his mission, Reed attended Utah State like I did and he lived with me and my other six roommates for a while.  At this time Reed clearly had strong positive feelings towards the LDS Church.  On more than one occasion he expressed to me and others his depth of conviction and belief in the teachings of the LDS Church.

I don’t say any of this to argue whether Reed’s current sexual orientation is a choice or a lifestyle decision, or whether he was born that way.  I do think it is important to point out a few things, however:

• If he felt this inclination while we were growing up, he never expressed it to me; and because we were close friends, I assume he never expressed it to anyone — at least not anyone outside his own family.  (If he were going to tell anyone, wouldn’t he tell a close friend first?)
• Based on that (admitted) assumption, I don’t think any mistreatment or bullying he may have experienced could be because of sexual orientation.
• Whatever Reed may choose to say about the LDS Church today, as recently as his early- to mid-twenties he held strong favorable views of the LDS Church, mostly achieved due to his own personal efforts at seeking spiritual enlightenment and fulfillment.

I guess what I’m saying is, in my experience being a good friend to him over a number of years, I did not witness or observe anything in either his sexual orientation or his religious behavior that would have led me to believe that he would someday publish a movie that was so openly pro-homosexuality and anti-Mormon.  Believe me, I’m not trying to imply that he did not feel this way back then; I’m simply saying that I, as one of his closest friends, did not observe it, and therefore, his movie on Prop. 8 surprised me.

I did, however, witness another behavior that can explain it.  In all that time, one thing I knew about Reed was that he wanted to be famous.  He was interested in news, journalism, filmmaking, movies, and the like from an early age.  I do recall on more than one occasion being concerned about his obsession for fame, when he would convey the feeling that he would do whatever he had to in order to be famous.

I, and other mutual college friends, witnessed a clear turning point for Reed when his opportunity for fame arrived.  It seemed to be no coincidence that opportunities in show business and broadcast journalism began opening up for him at the same time that he turned suddenly from the standards of the LDS Church that he had previously kept.

I can’t help but wonder if his angst toward the LDS Church comes not from adamant disbelief but from frustration:  Frustration at not being able to do whatever one wants with one’s life and yet still remain strongly affiliated with the church.  Many criticize the LDS Church for this, but it is no different than most other private organizations.  A labor union surely wouldn’t look too kindly on members who don’t pay their dues and who don’t agree with the union’s agenda.  An AA group would surely have issues with members who are making no effort at all to stop drinking.  Yet somehow, I guess because it is a church, it isn’t that uncommon for disaffected members to feel animosity toward the church when, after making choices that are not in harmony with membership requirements, they find themselves not strongly affiliated anymore.

There’s a strange irony in all this.

I lost contact with Reed after he left Utah to pursue his career.  Years passed, when suddenly I heard the tragic news of the accidental death of Reed’s son.  My heart broke at the thought of one of my friends suffering through the death of one of their children.  Since that time I have attempted on multiple occasions to reestablish contact with Reed.  I’ve sent multiple LinkedIn and Facebook connection requests.  All efforts have been ignored.  Yet I’ve read some of the things Reed has said lately about the LDS Church, implying that once he came out about his sexual orientation, he was ostracized by former friends and colleagues in the church.

My experience is the exact opposite — that once he came out about his sexual orientation, he ostracized me.

I wish he wouldn’t.  It is true that my faith is dear to me and I wish people wouldn’t have such strong animosity towards us.  It is true that I do not agree with his lifestyle choice, just as I don’t agree with the lifestyle choice of gossiping about one’s neighbor or the lifestyle choice of cheating on one’s spouse or the lifestyle choice of drinking alcohol.  However, it does not mean that I dislike the person pursuing any of those choices.  Particularly in the case of Reed Cowan, I still consider him a friend, and I miss him.  I wish he wouldn’t ostracize me anymore.  I’d like to have my friend back.

(For the record, I have NOT seen “8: The Mormon Proposition.”  I am aware of what it is about.  I don’t generally partake of any media that is known to be anti-Mormon.  I realize that this somewhat discredits this blog post, but I’ll live with it.)

But it is also time to vote, and I know how many of you are simply floundering with confusion at how you should proceed.  Thankfully, I’m here to tell you what to do.  Aren’t you glad you read this blog!

Of course, I would never presume to tell you which candidate to vote for.  If you need that, just ask the candidates themselves; they will tell you whom to vote for.  I’ve just got three pointers, advice I plan to follow myself.

Elect candidates who pledge fiscal responsibility. When I start to boil down many of our country’s problems to their essence, which I tend to do, this is a place where I generally end up:  Our country is not willing to live within its own means.

Many of the citizens aren’t either.  We want to have nice things now and pay for them later.  Sometimes we make such a decision with some degree of foresight and intelligence; sometimes we do it without any planning at all, proceeding instead on a vague hope to pay for it later; sometimes we don’t even give it that much thought.  Sometimes the things for which we are going into debt are completely frivolous, but not always.  We might justify buying that video camera on credit because our kids are not going to be so little forever, etc.

Fact is, living outside our means is not a path to wealth or prosperity, and we all know it.  Why do we allow our government to behave differently?

I can only assume that we do this because we are hoping that somehow we, individually, can start getting things without earning them, and when candidates run for office on the same principle, we are attracted to the idea.  It’s time for us to start electing government officials that are willing to operate the government under the same constraints that we operate under.

For years we’ve had a government operate by spending more and more money on more and more government programs without having a viable plan for even paying off the debt, let alone actually having the money to pay for it beforehand.  It should come as no surprise when our corporations and private citizens get themselves into irreparable trouble by operating under the same financial principles as our government.

This simply cannot continue, and fixing it is up to you.  Don’t vote for candidates with silver tongues; vote for those who have as a part of their platform a return to fiscal responsibility.

Elect candidates who pledge a return to adherence to the Constitution. So here’s where we are now.  We have a national constitution which describes how our government will run.  And we have a national government.  What we do not have is a national government that operates according to the national constitution which describes how it will operate.  Instead, we declare war without involving Congress; we have judges creating law instead of interpreting it; we pass Patriot Acts which legalize the arrest and imprisonment of citizens without due process of law; we allow a federal government to create more and more law and regulation instead of leaving powers to states.

What will it take to return?  It will require electing officials that are more concerned with constitutionality than popularity and correctness than power.  If you’re considering a candidate who hasn’t explicitly expressed a return to Constitutional principles as a part of his platform, you can be pretty sure it doesn’t matter to him at all.

Don’t throw away your vote. How do you throw away your vote?  By not voting for the candidate you think is best.  Voting isn’t about trying to pick the winner.  It’s about making your opinion known and casting your vote for the person you think best represents you.  So don’t throw away your vote:  Vote for the person you think will represent you best.

Until I remember I could get myself a pretty sweet Porsche 911 GT3 or an Audi R8 for about the same price.  But anyway…

Truthfully, I do think it is great that some companies are taking the plunge to build electric vehicles.  I’m not sure they have enough of a market to survive without significant government incentives, and I don’t think most people could currently justify the cost without government rebates.  But I do appreciate them trying to improve our environment with electric vehicles.

Problem is, I think we’re spending a lot of effort and billions of dollars in the wrong place.

Top Gear did a bit of a presentation on this in the first episode of Season 11 when they did a mileage comparison between the Toyota Prius and a BMW M3 Coupé.  In the test they drove the Prius for ten laps around the test track, and let the M3 follow along behind, just keeping up.  Despite having over 300 more horsepower, twice the number of cylinders, and nearly three times the displacement, the M3 still managed to get better fuel economy than the Prius for the same level of (admittedly boring) performance.

Additionally, the M3 didn’t require a large number of batteries placed along the underside of the car.  Top Gear claimed that the nickel for these batteries is mined in Canada, then shipped to Europe for refinement, then to China for processing, then for Japan for manufacturing.  Fossil fuels (primarily diesel, I would imagine) are transporting this material all along the way I’d expect.

All of this fails to mention that if you buy an electric car like a Volt or a Tesla, you will be plugging it into the wall every so often to charge the batteries.  In most places in America you’ll be using electricity that was generated from coal, gasoline, or natural gas; I read somewhere that about 70% of the electricity in the United States is generated by burning fossil fuels.

So, for the sake of discussion, let’s consider the upcoming Chevy Volt, a rather smart-looking true electric car with a gasoline-powered failover engine (not an electric-gas hybrid like the Prius).  If you get one, you’ll likely spend an extra $20000 for a new Volt over a comparably-featured gas-powered vehicle.  (We are not including the government rebate here, since that is fake savings anyway.  Where do you think that money comes from?)  Assuming the gas-powered vehicle gets 30 mpg, at $4 per gallon for gasoline, you will need to drive your Volt 150,000 miles on electricity only in order to make back the money you spent on a more efficient car.  Since the Volt can only go about 40 miles on a charge before the gas engine kicks in, that’s a minimum of 3750 40-mile round trips you will have to make, or two such trips daily for 5 years.

Of course, some of those trips won’t be 40 miles, so you’ll need more trips to make the money back; some of those trips will be longer and will end up using gasoline anyway.

Obviously we’ve assumed here that the cost of electricity is zero, which is certainly not true.  Trying to pin down a cost for the electricity to run a Volt for 40 miles is more effort than I want to make, but without question you’ll have to drive your Volt a lot more than 150,000 miles to break even.

In fact, currently I think it’s fair to say that you probably will never make back the money you spent up front for an “efficient” vehicle.  And maybe you are okay with that.  You know, maybe you get a lot of pride out of feeling like you are doing good for the environment, or at least, out of feeling the admiration of those around you for doing good for the environment.  Some may call this being smug, but I’ll give you the benefit of doubt here.

If that applies to you, and therefore you are willing to spend an extra $20000 for an electric car, we have to conclude that, ultimately, you are paying the money in order to preserve the environment, even if it ends up costing you personally.  So don’t you think you should be sure it is actually preserving the environment?  Wouldn’t it be nice to know that, at a minimum, the gasoline you will save over the lifespan of the car will not be offset by the extra fossil fuels used to manufacture this car (as compared to a regular car) or by the fossil fuels used to generate the electricity that powers your car?

Because if the carbon footprint created by operating an electric car cannot offset the carbon footprint required to build the car and supply its power, what exactly are you paying for?

The reality is, the electric car is sort of a red herring.  It’s a path that the environmental lobby is pushing to keep us busy enough to ignore the real problem.  The real problem is not gasoline powered cars:  It’s electricity.  Until we adopt better ways of generating clean electricity, electric cars have no hope of making a big enough impact to solve the power consumption problem.

There’s lots of great alternatives for electric power plants:  Solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear, to name a few of the most obvious.  The problem is, the environmental lobby doesn’t like any of these alternatives either.  So they redirect us toward solving the electric cars problem while the real problem — clean power — continues to mostly elude us.  It is frustrating that we continue to allow our focus to be redirected to a tactic that cannot win at the expense of one that can.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

- Constitution of the United States of America, Amendment 1

Thus begins the first sentence of the first amendment of the Bill of Rights.  I think it is significant that, among all the rights that our founding fathers sought to establish and preserve, this was the very first one they thought of.  And for good reason:  An individual’s religion is central to their value system, to the way they think about things and view the world’s problems and potential solutions.  You cannot preserve freedom without preserving free exercise of religion.

A lot is being said these days about the intention of individuals of the Islamic faith to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City.  It is disappointing that many of those voicing opposition to the mosque are elected government officials, many in federal positions such as the United States Congress.  Surely they know that our constitution prohibits government involvement in restricting the establishment or free exercise of a religion.  I’ve particularly been surprised to hear many high-profile conservative voices expressing opposition; I would have thought, if anything, that they would be a bit more inclined to defend free exercise of religion.

I guess by now I should have learned not to expect too much from government officials by way of intelligent or rational behavior.

I can only assume that many people voicing concerns lack familiarity with Muslims.  I can’t say to be an expert in the religion either.  But I have known a number of them, off and on, over the past 20 or so years of my life.  None of them have threatened to kill me or blow anything up.  In fact, they seem to be pretty much normal people.

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, I can empathize a bit with these Muslim friends I have.  I think they are misunderstood, much like we Mormons are.  Contrary to what people may think, I don’t have any horns, I only have one wife, and I’m allowed to use electricity and everything.  We’re actually fairly normal people, and so are Muslims as far as I can tell.

I think some of this misunderstanding comes from the actions of radicals who profess to be of our faiths.  You have radical self-proclaimed Mormons who create polygamist cults, have multiple spouses, and marry 14-year-old girls.  You have radical self-proclaimed Muslims who hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings.  Polygamist “Mormons” are not following LDS beliefs and are excommunicated when discovered; perhaps something similar happens with terrorist “Muslims.”  Those polygamist “Mormons” are frustrating and humiliating to those of us trying to live a normal, LDS lifestyle; I know my Muslim friends have similar feelings about terrorist “Muslims.”

Sometimes people point to passages in the Koran that presumably encourage radical behavior as evidence that the Islamic faith endorses such behavior.  I haven’t read the Koran so I can’t speak too authoritatively about that.  But I have read the Bible, which Mormons regard as scripture.  I only hope these people who criticize Muslims for their Koran don’t read the Bible, particularly sections such as Genesis 22, where the prophet Abraham takes his son Isaac into the wilderness to sacrifice him on an altar.  Otherwise, these people would have the same complaint against not only Mormons but every Christian and Jewish faith.  I mean, what kind of people would regard a man who would kill his own son as a righteous prophet of God?

I’ll tell you who:  People who are willing to read the entire story in context.  People who are willing to understand what can be learned from such an event.  People who are willing to acknowledge that believing in goodness of Abraham in particular or the veracity of the Bible in general, or even learning the lessons that are meant to be learned therein, doesn’t mean that we should be expected to re-enact the specific behaviors discussed.

Not many years ago, the LDS church began construction of a temple in Belmont, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston.  Citizens there expressed concern about the planned construction and even filed a lawsuit to prevent certain elements of the planned construction from taking place.  I can only imagine how difficult this must have been for those of my faith who were involved.  On the one hand I’m sure they wanted to establish good relationships with the community and especially nearby neighbors and have only positive feelings towards the LDS church.  On the other hand, the land had been purchased specifically for that purpose, and the building planned for construction met with the zoning laws for that particular piece of land.

All of this sounds pretty similar to the case of the Muslim mosque at Ground Zero today.  It is privately owned land; current zoning for that land allows the mosque to be built;  lawfully constructing and building a mosque is a peaceable exercise of their religion that is protected by the First Amendment.  It seems pretty clear that unless the government oversteps the bounds of the constitution (which, unfortunately, seems rather common lately), the construction and operation of the mosque should be allowed.

Truthfully, I’d hope our government would do more than just allow it.  I’d hope our government would use it’s enforcing power to defend and protect the right of Muslims to free exercise of their religion at that mosque against those who would infringe upon those rights.  Our government did not do that with my 19th century Mormon ancestors, who eventually had to leave the country to be able to practice their religion.  To see the rights of these Muslim citizens protected would be a good sign to me that things are better now than they were 150 years ago.

Since my logic is irrefutable, the only argument left for those opposing the mosque is that constructing one at Ground Zero is insensitive to the families of those who were killed that dreadful day.  The fact is that Muslims were among those killed when the buildings collapsed, so if it is insensitive, it is insensitive to Muslims as well as those of any other (or no) faith.  But whether it really is insensitive is certainly an opinion, not a fact, and is subject to interpretation; presumably the thinking is that people may be offended by it.  However, people get offended for lots of reasons.  Whether the mosque at Ground Zero offends me is pretty much up to me.

Unlike religious freedom, there is nothing in the Constitution anywhere that preserves my right to never be offended.  In fact, the very nature of the First Amendment pretty much guarantees that I’ll eventually run across something that offends me, if I choose to take such offense.  Part of being an American means having some degree of tolerance of other people’s rights so that you can have yours.  Even if I don’t agree with the mosque or the Muslim faith, it is important that I defend their right to build it, so that my right to do the same will likewise be preserved when I need it someday.