When Lateisha was 16-years-old

The economy functions as a system, too, which is why there can be a domino effect inside it, as when people lose their jobs and then reduce their spending, which means that factories can't sell as much Stuff, which means that more people get laid off . . . which is exactly what happened in 2008 and 2009. Systems thinking as related to the economy also explains a theory like "trickle-down" economics, in which benefits like tax cuts are given to the wealthy so that they'll invest more in businesses, which would hypothetically in turn create more jobs for the middle and lower classes. If you didn't believe these parts (money, jobs, people across classes) operated within a system, there'd be no basis for the trickle-down theory, or for beliefs about the interplay between supply and demand. All these examples assume interrelated parts within a larger system.


When Lateisha was 16-years-old, she wrote her father and I a letter explaining how she felt about being gay, but I've known since she was about 6 years old. When we would go shopping, she would be in the girls' section looking at clothes. She didn't want us to talk about it. She wanted us to write back if we had anything to say. But I knocked on her bedroom door and said we need to talk. We didn't need a piece of paper between us to talk about this. I told her that I didn't have a problem with it but I tried to explain that the ignorance of some people would be hard to handle. She told me she didn't care because this is who she was and what she wanted.

It's funny: Most people's professional paths start with a general interest that becomes increasingly specialized with years of education, training, and on-the-job implementation. There's powerful social and professional validation for increasing specialization like this. I, however, took the opposite path: I started with a fascination—and outrage—about garbage, specifically about the bags of the Stuff piled up on New York City's Upper West Side. After getting a degree in environmental science, I got a job with Greenpeace International, which paid me to track the destination and the impact of all the waste loaded onto ships in the United States and sent abroad. My whole job was about investigating and stopping the international dumping of waste.

On a Friday afternoon late last year, press secretaries from every recent administration gathered in the Ward Room of the White House at the invitation of Ari Fleischer, press secretary to President Bush. There was no agenda.

It was just one of those unexpectedly nice things that seemed to transpire during the brief period after September 11 when people thought of themselves as Americans first and Democrats and Republicans second. Over a lunch of crab cakes and steak, Republicans such as Fleischer and Marlin Fitzwater traded war stories with Joe Lockhart, Mike McCurry, and assorted other Democrats. Halfway through lunch, President Bush dropped by unexpectedly and launched into an impromptu briefing of his own, ticking off the items on his agenda until he arrived at the question of whether it was preferable to issue vague warnings of possible terrorist threats or to stay quietly vigilant so as not to alarm people.

At this point, former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers piped up, "What do the poll numbers say?" All eyes turned to Bush. Without missing a beat, the famous Bush smirk crossed the president's face and he replied, "In this White House, Dee Dee, we don't poll on something as important as national security."