Invision

I once got a phone call out of the blue one Sunday morning. It was a woman and the emotional distress was very evident in her voice. She was asking me questions about various political topics. I immediately recognized her state of mind as concerned with life and death problems of the human condition and bipolar. She said she dialed my number simply from hodgepodge selection. She said she often did this to talk to people at random. I believe I was help to her.

I had a degree of suspicion that such a call might be the work of political operatives of one type or another. If one talks to a lot of strangers and one believes that certain political entities might take an interest in one, then the suspicion is natural. But I had a rule about it. I didn't care. If one deals in suspicion it is a swamp. If one's response to people is based on conjecture, which may be completely fabricated in one's mind, then it shadow-boxing with oneself.

There is no way to be absolutely sure of any number of people's motives. Why treat them like criminals if they are not? My rule was always to tell the truth. I premised this on a rule I adopted in DC, almost immediately on my arrival. I was offered the possibility of gaming the system in exchange for remuneration of one kind or another. But I realized the system would game me. I was a small fish in a big pond. Once one was on the take, one was subject to blackmail by bigger fish without recourse. They had higher connections. My rule for independence was absolute honesty. If there was nothing I wanted, there was no way to manipulate me.

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