The Importance of the “Witness”

This is a quickie.

This photograph is currently circulating on Linkedin.  The poster is apparently suggesting that President Obama never hugged active duty troops, which in some circles is code for saying that President Obama has disdain for the troops, the American missions in Afghanistan/Iraq, American exceptionalism and the Constitution.  Many current and past political pundits, politicians and wannabees have said as much.

The interesting thing about this suggestion is it is flatly uninformed and untrue.  Photographer Erika Barker, who works for a communications firm in NY and has worked for Conde’ Nast, the NFL, DIRECTV among others, apparently happened to see the poster’s post and said, “I sure do. I was there”, and posted a photo of President Obama hugging troops.  In fact, Janet Goodman-Clarke, another marketing and photography professional in NY also posted a photo of the president hugging a soldier with prosthetic legs.  Who knows how many more photos invalidating the poster’s assertion are in that response thread.

An easy comeback might be, “Well, President Bush was sincerely hugging the troops while President Obama was doing it for the camera.”  And that is why easy responses are easy – because they don’t require much due diligence, which is why many such uninformed opinions flow so freely on social media.

It is the job of the Commander-in-Chief to command.  I cannot think of a president who has not cried for wounded or fallen troops.  It is a luxury for such posters to editorialize what is going on in the pictures.  The truth is the emotions exchanged between the leader and those they are leading are deep and personal and beyond shallow, petty and self interested interpretation.

But another true fact about such strong feelings by the people who have them is that the inaccuracy isn’t so much about the truth, but about how the people making the accusations don’t feel heard.  Much more must be done to try to find a way to heal what seems to be a genuine rift amongst our countrymen and women.  Feeling separated from the discussion can make people angry.  And when people are angry, they can see things that aren’t there and not see things that are there.

Which is exactly why the witness is so important.

Is That All You’ve Got?

This isn’t about interviewing.

I love big projects, because as they progress, they evolve. And the way I see them changes. For instance, the big project I’m working on now, which is a specialized website, made me see differently how I wanted it to look and what I wanted it to do. I started with what I knew, thinking, “That will work”. But as I walked forward through it, what I knew started to look more limited while what I envisioned started to look less pedestrian.

I wanted it to have more functionality, which meant more sophistication. For example, on one page, I have simple reviews of several dozen things. Each review has five different aspects. And each aspect has a definition. For someone looking at a review that includes those aspects, they might need a reminder of what those aspects mean. So I added five links beside each thing that could be clicked to reveal aspect definitions. But that just cluttered up the page and made it look more amateurish. I’m no high end coder, but looking at web design these days, it’s obvious that less is more.

So how to put the definitions there without creating an extra 250 links? Then someone suggested something that stays put while the rest of the page moves. The same five links would always be there, but only those five. They were talking about a scroll follow box. It took me a few days to figure out how to build one, but I did it.

Then, I have a great map but I wanted it to be more functional. I remembered that some images can have images inside them. That’s called an image map. So I found instructions on how to build one. BTW, the website W3Script.com is a great site to learn about html and text and .css. The map is almost finished, I think.

Anyway, I said all of that to say it’s work to move beyond what you know. Sometimes, it’s easier to say, “that’s good enough”. And you might say that for a lot of reasons. Maybe you say it as you’re halfway through excellent, struggling toward perfect, and you realize “I can stop now”. Maybe you’ve been beating your head against something for a long time and you’ve had a lot of dead ends and you’re really tired and you decide that maybe it is the best you can do. Or maybe you realize that the people you’re doing something for just don’t deserve your best work as a professional because they don’t respect you as a person.

Whatever the reason, the decision to take the path that moves a project from mediocre to good to something you can live with is always a very personal choice. And I think that once you start moving down that harder path, you can’t really bitch about the work it takes to travel it. The achievement might make it worth it, or the effort might make it worth it. But it is always up to you to decide how far down that path you go.