Crickets

Dear Reader,

Are you there? Do you care? Am I making sense or losing your understanding or interest? Question me. Challenge me. Criticize me. I want to do a better job, but my perspective on myself is limited; I need help finding ways to make this better. I am but a man, with a man's many flaws, trying to carry this particular load for the community.

The ideas I'm trying to capture and express are a crucial part of the theoretical framework for VISTA, the part that says how to develop it. If these ideas were better understood and accepted, the evils VISTA has suffered and that veterans have suffered as a result could not have occurred without immediate public outcry. The lack of understanding of this lifecycle created the vulnerability that has been exploited for the last fifteen years. If we want to put a stop to this kind of attack on our patients, we need this book. We've needed it for a long time.

We need this book to be as good a book as we can make it, to be clear and compelling. It will be much better if we engage in a dialog now, while we can work out the ideas in electronic format. Once it goes into print, it's too late to fix the ideas or improve the explanations.

I'll make you a deal.

If you help me find the flaws in my arguments and improve the ways we explain this lifecycle, I will credit you for those improvements explicitly in the print version of the book. Public credit is as much a VISTA tradition as friendly public criticism.

Yours truly,
Rick