On this Plain Talk, recorded live from TedXFargo, me and co-host Chad Oban talked about the rationalizations and excuses we make for ourselves in politics. Which also just happened to be the subject of my talk at the event.

The decisions we're making politically — who we vote for, who we give money to, who we oppose — are what's driving what's happening to our country. But when things go poorly, we like to blame others. The lobbyists. The billionaires. The media. I'll not defend those things, but we also have to look in the mirror. We have to point the finger at ourselves.

We are defending people who don't deserve a defense.

We are attacking people who don't deserve to be attacked.

Also on this episode, we interviewed Jen Burgard, founder and executive director of Haven, a Fargo-based nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting families navigating pregnancy or infant loss. Burgard was also a speaker at TedXFargo, and talked about her group's efforts to guide families through loss and grief. She also discussed the way her organization was victimized by a woman who faked a pregnancy, and the loss of an infant, and embezzled a significant amount of money, something Burgard chronicled in her blog False Hope.

That incident nearly ended Haven, but Burgard kept it alive. "I decided that if this organization was going to fail, it wasn't going to be because of her," she said. "That's it. If it fails, it fails. Just like any business, right? Sometimes things don't work out. But it was not going to be because of her."

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