This Good Decision Project has been occasionally criticized for its nearly singular focus on the word “Good”.  The criticism suggests such a focus ignores what is bad, evil or just uncomfortable in this world.  I have found just the opposite has occurred.  A clear dynamic sense of good sets a very helpful filter for discerning what isn’t so good or just plain bad. The word “good” in general use can become like a fruit tree that badly needs pruning. For the neglected fruit tree, the original delicious fruit increases in number but generally decreases in individual tastiness and usefulness as the tree devotes more of its resources to the trees ever larger, needy infrastructure reducing whats available for the yield.  The limits of the natural system requires the unpruned tree to yield a lot of bad fruit.  And so it is with this Project’s mission.  If we don’t prune our Sense of Good as we grow into our adult and elderly contexts we can easily find ourselves applying the word good to things that are no longer good and possibly to things that may have been good, but now are ‘bad’. 

In politics it is rare to find an issue in which one or the other sides doesn’t have a few good points. Occasionally the rare renegade even evil issue arises  as in holocaust deniers and their supporters, but It strikes me for the divisive core national issues, we mostly have two sides who are afraid to prune their sense of good given what science and rational thought have taught us in the century we live in.  This model of decision making supports the concept that good is a process must live and operate in us in the context of the day in which we living.  This is not a nod to unrestrained relativism in the sense that anything can be justified, but rather a plea not to reduce complex issues to undisciplined cartoon caricatures and slogans.  Which ever side we are on in this divided time, we have work to do. One half of this country is not going to disappear what ever the outcome of the election. To avoid a national yield of bad fruit I hope we can mutually prune our own personal sense of good to the times we live in, and find way to help neighbors, whoever and whatever they believe, do the same.  I sense it has to be a mutual exchange regarding the ever changing nature of this ambiguous word ‘good’.