Ron Collins
Jul 25, 2017 · 2 min read

I read you loud and clear, Leslie Loftis, and I appreciate such an articulate and insightful reply.

(big sigh…)

You’re the lawyer here. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m in the getting-things-done business. I clearly don’t have the patience for the game the way it is played, in law or politics either one.

In my world, a thing gets built or installed or repaired, and I get paid for it. No ifs, ands or buts, no excuses or obfuscations or surprises, just a simple equation of Result=Paycheck.

Law turns on evidence, the evidence is governed by rules of admissibility, and cases in law do not hinge on any result delivered but rather on which party manages to have counsel tweak both rules and evidence in their favor more effectively. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Politics is even worse. Its evidence is called “data.” Data has no rules, only salesworthiness. Sell the chumps on your data, you get your bill or program or allocation passed. Your data gets a tomato in mid-performance, and so does whatever initiative you’re pitching. And again, truth plays no part in any of it.

I haven’t the patience, nor the tolerance nor the stomach, for things not getting done because everybody is playing an angle and lying to each others’ faces. I can look at your materials above, and see the obvious, so obvious I can hardly see anything else.

You see it too, but you can’t say it. It isn’t in the numbers, so it may as well for all intents, etc, not exist.

I can’t live like that. I can’t think like that. I can’t stay sane like that.

I have never understood how anyone can, and have, mea culpa, near-zero tolerance for it. Nothing personal.

Looks like you can deal with that madhouse kind of operating, and I offer you a respectful:

better you, than me.

I have to stick with delivering results. It feels more like honor.

On this side of the loony-bin fence, I at least get to both see the obvious, and call it what it is. I continue to be astonished at what a confrontational act that is taken as, on the other side of that wire.

Good luck getting back over it when you can.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s