“You’ve got to fight fire with fire.” I don’t know how many times I heard that growing up; as a boy and as an adult. Here’s what it meant: if you don’t meet offense with equal or greater force, you’ll be taken advantage of for the rest of your life. Like many, I took it to heart.

Many years ago, I was teaching math and education at a teacher’s college in Ghana. Each year the local schools held a basketball tournament. It wasn’t like tournaments in the United States. The courts were outdoor concrete slabs in rough condition. There were no bleachers. The lines were painted, but I doubt the dimensions were exact.

One of my favorite TV shows of all time was Firefly. It was a space western. That may sound like a contradiction, but it worked. Unlike most science fiction shows, there were no humans in makeup pretending to be aliens. The story centered on people who left “Earth-that-was” and settled in other parts of the galaxy. There was space travel and planet development, but the real focus was on people and how they handled their environment and culture.