I am pleased to bring you Issue 363 of Uncommon Sense! We’ve got some important ground to cover in this issue, some of it serious, some of it perhaps a bit whimsical.

There are many facets of leadership and one of them involves displaying courage without being obnoxious. Sometimes doing what is popular is a far cry from doing what is right. I will explain the distinctions in the Self-Development column.

For The Elephant in the Room column, I will turn over the duties to one of my favorite Thought-Leaders – Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. VDH has an uncanny ability to sort out and sift through the chaos, getting to the heart of the matter. He is adept at making sense of the chaos and he often deals with macro-subjects that shine a white-hot spotlight on what is really going on around us as a society. As he will demonstrate in this Part 1 of his recent column, it’s not pretty. He will finish his message in the next issue of Uncommon Sense (Issue #364). See if you can relate to his shrewd observations.

I am an observer of human nature. Human nature, with all its quirks and idiosyncratic mannerisms, is something I tend to pay attention to. The From Ara’s Journal column will explore one of those oddities in human nature – the handshake. Take a look and see if you can recognize the various ways we humans perform this social ritual.

I love words! The richness of the English vocabulary is a thing to behold. When people speak or write effectively, I am intrigued and impressed. And if you learn to speak and write with a richness in your own personal lexicon, I think you will be better off. So check out the latest in The World of Words column and enrich your own expressive capabilities.

OK, let’s get started.

Ara Norwood