Most people remember those “connect-the-dots” puzzles children use  in most elementary schools. The task is to draw lines connecting a series of numbered dots to form an image. If the numbers are followed, it’s impossible for them to fail to get the picture. And, even though some children are better at it than others, eventually they all get the same image — a horse, a tree, a face, a cartoon character, or whatever. Aha!, assuming all the children got the same puzzle, to their delight, success.

In the real world, as adults, we routinely are required to get the “big picture” of whatever seems puzzling to us. In this case, the numbered dots are assorted facts that, in and of themselves, make no particular sense. Such facts only make sense when they are connected. Looked at another way, acquiring facts (information) is not the same as acquiring knowledge (understanding).

Knowledge comes about only when isolated facts are connected with lines penciled from all prior formal and informal, or academic and experiential, understandings. To the point, if you connect the dots and get a picture of a zebra, but you don’t know what a zebra looks like from actually having seen one, there is no Aha! moment. The puzzle merely becomes more puzzling.

To extend this little metaphor a bit, whether it is in the adult world or in some elementary school, the task of connecting the dots does not require any special training or knowledge other than what we normally possess. It is not rocket science, and you don’t have to be a genius to get the picture. All it takes is a steady hand and attention to the dots and numbers (facts, in the adult world). Why, then, I ask, do adults seem to have so much trouble connecting the dots in the admittedly more complex puzzles associated with deeper understandings of personal, community and civic life?

Are we hopelessly distracted by issues of class, ethnicity and ideology? Do we lack focus? Have our hands grown so unsteady with the monotonous and often dreary tasks of everyday life that we are unable to draw a straight line? What is it that continues to blind us? There are many examples that illustrate what I’m talking about here, but one in particular comes to mind.

Last Christmas, a young man from Nigeria — a wannabe terrorist — boarded a Northwest Airlines jet on a flight to Detroit. During the flight, he lit a fire bomb. Luckily, it didn’t work as planned. Instead of spreading fire throughout the plane, it set the young man’s pants on fire. Passengers and crew quickly doused the fire and subdued him. After a safe landing, they turned him over to authorities and, from what I hear, he confessed all. He is now sitting in prison somewhere.

In the aftermath of the near tragedy, a number of known facts surfaced. First, the young man’s own father had reported him to the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria because of concerns about his son’s potentially dangerous “radicalization and socialization” Second, it was known that the young man had ties to al-Qaida. Third, his name was in a U.S. government potential terrorist database. Connecting these and other dots, how was this guy able to get a passport, travel to the United States and gain passage on a  commercial jet?

Well, shortly after the incident, President Obama convened a meeting of our national intelligence agency heads to find out what happened. After a thorough hearing, here’s what he said: “The bottom line is this: the U.S. government had sufficient information ... but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list. This was a failure to integrate and understand the information we already had.”

As I suggested earlier, this is just one of many examples of our failure to connect the dots that affect our lives. In the great puzzle of life, our ability to connect the dots — to get the right picture and know what it is we are looking at — is indispensable to the task of successfully making the difficult choices that shape our attitudes, values and behavior. We have plenty of information these days, but information without understanding only creates another  puzzle. Connecting the dots merely becomes a childish game we have no time to play.

Have a nice day!



Primus Mootry is an Anderson resident. His columns are published each Wednesday.