The Goal

Over the months to come, I plan on filling this site with fact and opinions to keep you informed. As this is just the beginning of the blog, I think I should spend one entry telling you a little about myself.

My name is Clifford Allen Potts. I am a father, a husband and a writer. This past year WordTechs Press has released four of my works. They are

• Well Past Midnight
• Radicals, Religion, and Revelation
• Conspirators, Confederates, and Cronies
• Wealth, Women, and War

I will discuss those in some detail at a later time in this blog. WordTechs Press is a fully licenced business entity publishing e-books in the Dallas business community. They are always looking for new, fresh, inspired material.

In the 1990s I was in the information technology field. In 2000 Corporate America decided to ship our jobs to India. Over the past seven years I have worked as a security officer Fort Worth, Texas. I have a Bachelor of Science in Telecommunications Management, and a diploma in radio broadcasting. I also have an honorary Ph.D. in Metaphysics (that and a buck and a half will buy you a cup of coffee – so long as it is not at Starbucks). It is a religious degree from ULC. I am also an ordained minister. I was ordained as a Baptist Minister in 1983 in San Francisco, California.

A long time ago someone told me to tell y’all that, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could.” To some degree that is true. In 1998 I moved to Texas from Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. Pleasant Prairie is just north of the Illinois-Wisconsin border, and just south of Kenosha (yes, there really is a Kenosha, Wisconsin – but I was not there in the 70s.) I was hired to work for a rather difficult client that the local firm’s own staff did not want to deal with. To work for them was the kiss of death. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances I got stuck in Texas like a fish out of water.

Over the past seven years I have, for the most part, learned to fit in. In general the Great Lakes culture is moderate to far left. Even the conservatives in and around the Lake Michigan area are far more moderate then what you find in Texas. Texas, for the most part is extremely individualistic (which is what you find in predominately agricultural cultures – and of course they forget how much they depend on Federal Aid), with a general tendency to lean to the right. Some of them are pretty far right. Bush and company are an example of that.

I was born in California. My family moved to Chicago in 1968 after having lived in Cerro-de-Pasco, Peru (15,000 feet up in the Andes). I grew up in Chicago. I have also lived in L.A. and San Francisco, California. In from July 1982 to October 1983, I worked for Jews for Jesus at their headquarters in the city by the bay. It is a pretty city. I have worked with many different people. My ex-clients include EDS, Xerox, Southland Corporation (better known as 7-11), Aon Corporation, the EPA, ComEd, Baxter Labs, Abbot Labs, and Johnson Controls. That is just a few of the client firms.

As Teddy Roosevelt said:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

His words are good words. They are noble words which we have forgotten today. They are words that need to be remembered, and applied.