This is a long one. But enough about me. To lay the foundation for this post, allow me to state a couple of strong beliefs that I possess. Please keep your hands and feet inside your vehicle at all times as we move through these thoughts. Here we go.

Birth and Projection

The first is that I believe people are, on the whole, born and not made. That is to say, nature constitutes a person’s personality much more than nurture. A one-hour old baby is almost identical to the same human eighty years later, except that he’s acquired a bunch of real-world knowledge along the way (plus has gone through a million different versions of his body along the way).

For example, I’m a dog person. I was born that way. It wasn’t because, unlike my own children, I was surrounded by dogs from birth (N.B. the first word out of my children’s mouths wasn’t ma-ma or da-da, but dog; I have a special pride in that). Although I had a couple of dogs during my youth, they weren’t really “mine” and I hardly remember anything about them. However, when I reached adulthood, my first instinct, shared with my girlfriend (now wife of many decades) was we have got to get a dog. I was born that way. So was she.