My father took his first job in 1947, after graduating from MIT on the GI Bill.

He worked for the first company to produce a ball point pen for under a dollar, and he quickly worked his way up to become foreman.

He came to the two owners and showed them how the could improve efficiency in a way that would boost profits by 30 percent.

They weren't interested.

I might as well have set off a bomb. Nearly every girl in the room began shouting as if I had committed the worst from or heresy.

Could it be that asking permission in the first place is actually easier than asking forgiveness later? That may depend on how we define the word “easy.”

We are spiraling toward increasingly blind ideology, intellectual incoherence, and moral anarchy. We are abandoning order for chaos. We are overturning our core values for a false vision of a utopian dream that will steal from us all the good we have built over generations and leave us with nothing but misery.

It's only a minority that are instigating this. But it's a vocal minority, and they have claimed control of the narrative.

If the rest of us go along with it, we'll have no one but ourselves to blame.

We can't stop the flim flam. But we don't have to take it lying down, either. Use your voice. Be informed and articulate. Be civil yet firm. Our future depends on standing together and speaking truth to corruption.

In August 2005, Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza (which it had captured from Egypt in the Six Day War), giving over full control of the region to the Arab population. In that seminal moment, Gazan Arabs had an opportunity to transform their country into another Singapore or Dubai. Instead, they celebrated their independence by destroying much of the infrastructure Israel left behind. They then elected the terrorist party Hamas to run their government.

From that moment forward, Gaza became a source of constant attacks against Israeli civilians. Billions of dollars in humanitarian aid from the US and Europe was diverted from building infrastructure and promoting trade to constructing hi-tech invasion tunnels and acquiring rockets.

What other country in the world would tolerate repeated acts of terror? What choice did Israel have but to defend itself and seal off its borders? But this played into the hands of Hamas leaders, who used their own people as human shields and exploited collateral damage from Israeli retaliation to manipulate world opinion, accusing Israel of war crimes.

How is it possible that people can look at the same events and see such diametrically opposing pictures? How can we solve our problems when we can't agree on how to interpret what's right before our eyes?

The challenge increases when the choices are less obvious and the stakes are not life and death. Whether in business, in education, in families, and in politics, when we see only what we want to see, any meeting of minds becomes impossible and finding common ground remains a distant dream.

Sometimes it comes down to differing values and priorities. But it can also come from our subconscious filtering out information and thereby depriving us of the opportunity to see the world objectively and honestly.

So what do we want: To reside comfortably in the world of illusion, or chart our way back to reality?

My son thought he was going to Israel to spend the holidays with his sister and fiancee. Now he’s stationed at the Lebanon-Syria border.

The goal of terror is to disrupt our lives, to force us to live in fear waiting for the next attack. Because to live in fear is to concede defeat. And Israelis are too stubborn to do that, especially when we know that our enemies hate us for one reason and one reason alone:

Because we are Jews.

"You looked so happy while you were speaking."

Which is true, of course. Ultimately, that's why I speak. That's why we speak. The stories, the lessons, the wisdom... they're all fighting to get out of us.

As the revered Rabbi Abraham Kook said, "I don't speak because I have the power to speak. I speak because I don't have the power to remain silent."

But when we come from a place of insight, education, and eloquence, it's impossible not to use our gift of speech in hope that we will inspire others to contribute to creating a better world.

Here’s a lesson I learned from my father.

On one occasion, after my parents had been seated at a restaurant, my mother reached for the breadbasket but then immediately recoiled. “There’s a bug in there,” she whispered to my father.

Sure enough. My father called over the waitress. “There’s a cockroach in our breadbasket,” he said quietly. The waitress, embarrassed and apologetic, removed the basket and brought a replacement.

There was a bug in the second basket as well. My father quietly called over the waitress a second time.

Is there anything that still goes without saying?

What's the cost of saying what needs to be said?

How can you speak to best ensure that your words will be heard?

There are plenty of established philosophies and outlooks that preach the same values: stoicism, moderation, temperance, self-discipline, and austerity, to name a few. Lying Flatism urges reducing the hours and energy invested in the daily grind as a means of achieving inner harmony and tranquility. That explains why leaders in China view it as a profound threat to their country’s vision of technological world domination.

But perhaps the most curious and disturbing aspect of the new Flatist movement is this: the notion that emotional intimacy and commitment are simply not worth the effort.

I don’t know where my host slept that night, whether curled up on the floor or sharing a mattress. But from the first moment we met until the next morning when I went on my way, he never stopped smiling, unable to contain his pleasure at having the opportunity to invite a guest into his home and share whatever was his.

I never did make it to World’s End. But I did end up someplace better.

Is there a practical strategy for protecting and supporting victims without rushing to judgment? And if we simply have to accept the imperfections of the system, does erring on the side of caution favor the accuser or the accused?

The time for gratitude is when nothing is going wrong. If we all practiced being grateful more often, we'd find less cause to complain, less cause to be bitter, less cause to fight with each other over all the problems that aren't as bad as we make them out to be.

Who doesn’t like a good story?

After spending my prodigal youth hitchhiking cross country and circling the globe, living abroad for a decade, and teaching high school for over 20 years, I have a few stories to tell….