Pollyanna relentlessly looked for the good in people.

The new President of the State Bar of Texas, Harper Estes, just wrote the best "My Opinion" column (in the Texas Bar Journal) that Blawgletter has ever had the privilege to read.  We challenge you to start reading it and then try to stop.  Betcha can’t do it.

What makes it compelling?  For starters, it opens with a humanizing title — "Call Me Pollyanna".  Which has at least one parallel in literature.  Remember that long whale story?  The one with Captain Ahab — he of the peg leg and textbook manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder? 

Right.  Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).  The novel opens with the main character in first-person narrator mode.  He says, immortally, "Call me Ishmael."

Call me Pollyanna grabs you in a similar way.  It draws you in.  You quickly see that the writer has a self-deprecating sense of humor.  You also infer that he has read a lot, relating themes and quotes not only from Pollyanna (the 1960 movie) but also from the likes of Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, and even Rabbi Tarfon.

President Estes also addresses a Serious Subject — that of making a difference to our profession and our communities.  He gently exhorts the 83,000 members of the Texas Bar to work together "to educate the public about the rule of law and its importance, not only to our democracy, but to the everyday lives of all Texans."

We urge you to begin reading President Estes’s column.  You won’t want to stop.  And it just might turn you into a Pollyanna too.