Can’t We Learn from Everyone Else?

Even after being out of the advertising business for a dozen years now, I’m still often reminded of a former client of mine back in Honolulu. He was the president of one of the banks in town and a wise man. Whenever one of his competitors came out with a new financial product or changed interest rates or took some action that seemed unusual, the first thing Jack would ask was, “What do they know that I don’t know?”
 

This bit of visual commentary appeared on Facebook the other day. Frustrating, isn’t it? While we’re chugging along at 79 miles-per-hour behind an Amtrak locomotive, almost everywhere else in the world, people are routinely being whisked around on high-speed trains running at 200 miles an hour . . . in Japan and in France and in Germany and in China. For the love of God, there’s even a high-speed rail system being built in Uzbekistan!
 
I want to confront the nay-sayers and the anti-rail politicians in this country, and taking a page from my former client’s book, scream at them: “Does it ever occur to you that the whole damn world might possibly know something we don’t know?”
 
Except Jack wouldn’t scream.