A Milestone

This is posting number 200, Monday and Friday for 100 weeks.  At this time I’d like to pause to tell everyone who reads Real American Solutions how much I appreciate your support.  The Google people who provide me space on blogspot.com also provide a dashboard telling me the number of page views and country of origin.  After an understandably slow start, I have gotten nearly 60,000 page views in the last year, running at a current pace of over 110,000 per year.  (This happened with no advertising or publicity, spreading by just word-of-mouth referrals and Internet searches.)  Readers come primarily from the US (95%), but every day there are a few from somewhere else in the world.  Having so many people interested in my thoughts is part of what motivates me.  Thank you very much.

My strongest motivation, however, comes from my belief in the behavioral model as a problem-solving tool.  There is no advertising on the site to distract from the content.  I am not writing for financial gain.    Emphasis is on the message:  that behavior has consequences and that both individual and group success rely on improving our decisions and actions.

I believe we must rethink our problems in a new way, a way that de-emphasizes politics, because our problems are ours to solve.  For over 20 years I have seen multiple survey results consistently reporting how Americans think their country is headed in the wrong direction.  We gave both political parties many chances and they let us down.  Politicians tell us what we want to hear, that they can make everything better with programs involving no effort on our part with money requiring no sacrifice from us.  That doesn’t work.  Our behavior is the source of most of the problems causing our dissatisfaction; only changing behavior will fix it.  (199 examples are available in the archives.)

My primary goal is to get people thinking and acting differently.  Answers will come when enough people look at problems in this new way, recognize similar behaviors, insist that politicians or advertisers play it straight, and hold themselves and their fellow citizens to a higher standard.

How many is enough?  You can help by continuing to read these postings.  Then enroll your friends and family to do the same.  Post a link on your social networks to spread the word.  By each of us telling just two or three other people, we can slowly build to that critical mass where together we start America moving in the right direction.

Again, thank you.