Musings & Meanderings

There weren’t any other voters present when I visited my polling place this morning. Where is everyone? Get out and vote!

It matters as much on a municipal level as it does on a provincial/state or federal level. Whether you consider the current state of affairs unacceptable or not, our votes contribute to either the status quo or to change. The size and extent of the contributions we are each able to make to our communities may differ, but the number of us who care enough contribute makes a difference in itself.

——
later: I want to be Hazel McCallion in my 3rd life. Both the part where she used to come downtown and drink all the guys under the table and the model grassroots ironfist combination.
85 years old. Starting her 11th term. 91% of the vote.

Visionaries and independent thinkers are found in every societal segment, but I’m focusing this post on the business world, which is where I first learned to recognize lone voices.

Most conversation is a lot of noise. The further inside you are, in circles of influence where pundits and the powerful enjoy up to the minute intelligence and sophisticated analysis, the louder the noise. Sure, it can be more ‘interesting’, or at least diverting, noise in those circles, but noise it remains.

Spend a few years in the ivory towers or even just the fast lane and you’ll see the epitome of viral spreading of information. The web version pales, although the mechanics are the same.

The smartest businessmen and their attendant analysts are highly discerning, constantly sorting through the clamor and making many fine distinctions between fact, spin, and rumor, in order to anticipate the consequences. A businessman and a true entrepreneur, however, are two completely different animals.

Businessmen manage money. Their motivation is to both protect it and make it grow. Innovation is not their thing. Of course the biggest returns are found on the leading edge, hence the awkward flirtation between money and ideas. Even more central to that flirtation is the fact that the innovation that hits the bullseye, that becomes the next big thing, will be hands down the sexiest girl at the dance. The guy that gets her will sit at the head table and be feted as brilliant.

True entrepreneurs don’t generally care much for businessmen, not least because their own visions are foreign, outside conventional view, and therefore often hard to convey. The extent of affluence in our time, together with technology, has created a breed of quasi entrepreneur, individuals whose raison d’etre is to plug in on one side to emerging trends and on the other to aggressive investors. This breed exists to sell out. They’re the loudest proponents of the money mantra that everyone is for sale.

The lone voice belongs to the independent thinker, and being one requires a much broader spectrum of motivation than money alone can provide.

My first strong memory of a lone voice dates to 1980. It belonged to local a real estate developer who had built an empire on the absolute best of old fashioned values, and also always made my (and most people’s) top ten in terms of class and integrity. His name is Eph (Ephraim) Diamond.

In the 50s, Eph and 2 partners created a residential development company called Cadillac, developing housing at a time of 3% interest rates and 30 year mortgages. It was also a time when long term bank lending at under prime was the norm rather than the exception. In the 60s, Cadillac merged with Fairview, which had originally been a builder of shopping centers, but was by then focused on urban commercial development. The combination, at that time, was in itself also remarkable. Think Sun merging with eBay. Cadillac Fairview went public around the time of the second oil crisis in ‘79, as markets headed into what would come to be called stagflation (high inflation plus high unemployment), with Eph as chairman.

In 1980, when interest rates hit and passed 20%, the ‘conversation’ or noise in the business world was so loud as to be almost deafening. Real estate development at that time was still dominated by private interests, a reality that would change dramatically over the following decade. A large number of the developers, in various major urban centers, were Jewish and of the builders Italian. (The first came from the history of private lending and the second from a wave of 20th century immigration to North America that settled in the construction business.) So the development industry’s contribution to the raucous noise on the high interest rates was particularly colorful, with Orthodox and Conservative members of the community seeking and transmitting the educated opinions of their rabbis on usury, opinions that even found their way into proposed laws in Ottawa and Washington.

Thousands of voices chattered at hyperspeed in an alarmed quest for revision of all future business planning based on this financial apocalypse. Eph, meanwhile, had come to his own conclusion, which he would state calmly to anyone who asked him. He said that the high interest rates were a temporary and unsustainable phenomenon, and that we would all see 6% (although not 3%) again in our lifetimes. No one agreed with him at the time.

This was the voice of an independent thinker. Large scale real estate developers, by the nature of their business, think in decades not quarters. Are they smarter than everyone else? Do they always get it right? Hell, no. As a matter of fact they are, for the most part, close to extinct today, replaced by an evolved hybrid in response to institutional investment rather than private style lending and the last of merchant banking.

The point of my story is about whether we hear and consider a lone voice amid the noise. Our economic dynamics change, but human nature doesn’t. Not everything said by every lone voice is prophetic or correct, but a much wider perspective can be gained by stepping back from the wave of noise, in order to hear ourselves, and others, think.

Heard a lone voice lately?

Doing some work on specific ways to combine social and commercial uses in a web project yesterday sent me into making comparisons to real estate development yet again.

Mixed use is a term used by urban planners to identify zoning that permits a combination of both commercial and residential uses. As a modern concept, it came into fashion in response to problems of scale inadvertently created as a result of booming population, prosperity and growth following WWII. Huge concrete towers and canyons, especially of office space (dead at night), and subsidized housing (inadvertently planned ghettoes) exacerbated many urban problems.

Combining businesses with homes in zoning for development was previously done on a more grass roots human level, and the traditional arrangement of businesses on major streets backed by residential enclaves behind them worked perfectly well in the old small town model, but didn’t translate well with economies of scale or high density development.

Toronto has avoided many of the urban decay problems faced by North American cities largely due to one man. David Crombie, for whom I have tremendous personal respect and admiration, was elected to our City Council in 1970, and became Mayor in 1972, serving 3 terms before leaving for Federal politics. He was known in Toronto as ‘the Tiny Perfect Mayor’, and could have continued in or returned to that office for many years afterward almost effortlessly based on his deserved popularity.

One of his first acts as mayor, however, stunning the local financial and development community, was to announce a total moratorium on development. His intent was to call a ‘time out’, reassess, and introduce the concept of mixed use. Once the money men had finished hyperventilating and dismounted from their ‘end of the world’ soapboxes, everyone naturally went back to work, planning and building for profit, and learning to adapt to the new zoning rules.

The first large mixed use development, ManuLife Center, was not an unqualified success. In 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that the layout of the complex, in attempting to insulate each of the 3 use elements (office, retail, and residential) from one another, undermined the theoretic principle of interactivity on which mixed use was based. Planning successful major urban real estate developments is as much about understanding and directing traffic flow as anything else, and the abrupt delineations between use areas in the ManuLife project translated into dead ends that halted traffic.

Looking at Toronto today, though, especially now that individual home office use in urban areas is a common reality, we can recognize the great contribution David made to our city in the area of urban development. We never did build another St. James Town, for example.

How does all this relate to a web project?

The barriers we maintain in our society, between personal space, marketplaces, and business are based on a balance between the benefits and hindrances that each offers the other. Some of these considerations cease to exist when physical contact is removed, but we are also creatures of habit, so our behavior patterns are not going to change overnight. Despite the fact that the virtual world can and will offer seamless integration of uses, to our great benefit, we still plan today’s successful site for the way users will actually behave today. These are also difficult new concepts to conceptualize to the average person, who wants the elevator pitch as much as VC investors do.

What is this new site for?

A. To share your pictures with family and with old and new friends. Got it!

B. To enable personal, hobbyist, commercial trading (and more) activities in hub communities of like-minded people. Huh?

Re-reading B above, I see in my memory the baffled looks on real estate developers’ faces in the 1970s, whose conceptions of urban landscapes then did not envisage, for example, today’s St. Lawrence neighborhood, although David did.

The idealistic vision central to the concept of mixed use in urban planning, however, is achievable in the virtual world of the future in a way that is hasn’t been in the bricks and mortar world. Even better, or perhaps essential, is that via this new world, mixed use can be developed in a user interactive organic manner.

How cool is that?

I removed yesterday’s links post after learning that the Canadian gaming site led to terrorist links.

People do need to get on with living their lives, and cannot do so when paralyzed by mortal terror. I get this. However, the extent to which people in this country avoid taking any personal responsibility for their communities is truly a sin of omission.

Are we so invested in our civilized culture, that we would sooner turn a blind eye to any activity that threatens to stain our polite veneer than safeguard what is ours? One doesn’t have to look hard, or do much more than open the eyes, to find information on the reality of terrorist activity here. Start with articles such as this one on the Mackenzie Institute site. If you’re looking for yourself, then please don’t stop there, but continue seeking information independently. I am not an expert or a journalist and my writings here are my personal opinions based on my own experiences and readings.

I years ago lost track of the number of Americans who, upon learning that I was from Toronto, responded with some form of, “Toronto is a beautiful city …it’s so clean.”. More and more the word clean, in this context, is coming to mean sanitized and antiseptic to me, but only, dangerously, on the surface. We sweep all ugliness and unpleasantness under the rug in order to maintain our pristine self image, and in doing so put our children’s future at peril.

The thing we’ve always touted with pride in this city, our tolerance and multiculturism, is becoming a fragile and uncertain thing as the world changes. I’m shocked to hear educated intelligent fellow citizens tell me that each ethnic community within our culture is responsible for cleansing its own.

Certainly no private individual can take responsibility for and action in segments of our society outside of their personal sphere. We each can, and should, though, take full responsibility within it, and communal responsibility throughout.

If this marvelous ‘melting pot’, as Torontonians proudly term this city, truly exists, then our spheres of personal influence overlap across demarcations of ethnic origins. Personal spheres of influence include ones family, friends, and co-workers, as well as community business and property owners. Who among us cannot count multiple ethnic origins among the denizens of those personal spheres?

Yes, it’s a heck of a lot harder to pay attention and comprehend the presence of dangerous influences in the lives of our children and everyone else we care about than it used to be. The sheer volume of contact enabled by this new world of technology we live in can be mind numbing on a personal level, and we’re often focused on learning to tune most of it out so we can get something done. Doing the exact opposite, opening our reception to the entire cacophony bombarding everyone around us, is simply impossible. Retreating ever further on a personal level, though, is an abdication of responsibility which equates directly with the rights and freedoms we’ve come to take for granted.

For too many people the only coping strategy for this is to turn increasingly to the comforting illusion that our law enforcement, our governments, our Big Brother, will take care of things. Those people we pay and elect to ‘take care’ of everything for us, though, are usually underpaid, sometimes corrupt, and often fallible human beings just like we are. We share responsibility for their actions no less than we do for our own or those of our families, employees, etc.

So how do we cope with the cacophony? The same way that we cope with the new media bombardment on a personal level. By creating and constantly fine tuning custom filters. The faster the world changes, the more flexible and adaptable we have to become. The single most frustrating aspect of exploding new technology and the changes in our world on a personal level is the fact that there’s no such thing as learning something new once and for all. Who hasn’t proudly mastered, at long last, a new idea or tool only to be rudely greeted with the fact that it’s outdated, requiring us to update our skills against encroaching obsolescence? That’s a pretty rough treadmill for most people. Who personally has the time and ability to fully observe and analyze even a fraction of the entire cacophony?

The result of this is that just as we’re all being drawn into the overwhelming global pool of humanity through technological connections and advances, many normal, well meaning people are instinctively retreating to safety. The ‘pooling’ of humanity, the breaking down of the barriers that separate us, is, perversely, also highlighting our differences and conflicts.

I believe this is actually a good thing. The time of change we’re living through isn’t easy, but change never is. Growing up has always been hard. Every challenge, though, every painful transition, is exaggerated by denial and eased by willed acceptance.

The world will continue to get smaller. We and our children will continue to become more and more vulnerable …until we decide to face that reality. The same new elements of our existence that expose us to danger offer the means to safety and survival when we embrace cognizance and take up the responsibility for our rights and freedoms.

Focusing our political attention on red herrings such as overloud protest about racial profiling is no more productive than election time mud slinging, tactics which are used to cry wolf until they lose meaning. If you’re just a business person, or just a worker, who, like most of us, concentrates most of your energy on paying the bills, getting ahead, and remembering to celebrate your humanity at the same time, you still retain the choice of whether to be a witless pawn or a responsible citizen. In choosing the latter, you accept, as I do, that we all have a personal stake in creating the world we want to live in.

Sane human beings have a built in moral compass. Personal freedom, both an ancient and a modern concept, is a bounty of taking ownership of and being guided by that compass. When you choose to follow a leader whose words make you feel good and appeal to you personally without examining the underlying premises determining your course, you are handing over your freedom rather than joining it to a group or cause.

Would doing that make you a bad person? Evil? Well meaning but misguided? An innocent dupe? Are any of those descriptions a sufficient self-goad to take the time to learn, analyze, and make conscious choices rather than taking the path of least resistance? I believe that those of us who choose freedom and responsibility can act and strengthen our cause from within the parameters of our daily lives.

Canada today is not always an easy place in which to state such opinions, but there have not been many societies or many moments in human history where it was easy. Human freedom has typically been won through revolution, not argument. Forming, holding, and stating a strong opinion garners attention. It also has a wonderful way of identifying solid relationships and cementing them, when it is based on a foundation of honesty and respect.

We are a clean and polite society here. Simple politeness is as powerful a means of showing respect as it is a tool of hypocrisy. It is the latter use which is dangerous. The fact that those who decide to send our troops, our family members, to Iraq can only make doing so politically palatable by calling it peace keeping and making loud statements of policy decrying barbarous methods and practices, is totally representative of our sanitized self-image.

We’ve learned to be horrified by sexual predators (although we still let them out), and are no longer surprised to hear a neighbor telling a reporter how nice and normal the perp seemed. Why is it acceptable to note, for example, that crime rates are higher in poor neighborhoods, but not to identify which societies spawn higher or lesser numbers of predators? Can not such identification focus as equally and constructively on identifying desirable societal attributes? Where does our treasured multiculturalism, in which each ethnic group contributes and is proud of its best, disappear to? Most importantly now, are we prepared to reason clearly enough to address real threats of terrorism that make us more vulnerable in this shrinking world without being handicapped by our racial and other insecurities?

The tiny restaurant is empty save for the proprietor working by the Gaggia machines that have drawn me in for my fix. As I move in close to the counter, he turns his face up with a welcoming smile. It’s a beautiful boy face, although this is not a child, and I can see it freshly washed over flannel pajamas, trusting to be lovingly fed its share of family breakfast. As he registers my detailed Java preparation request, looking eager to obey, happy to work, I try to decide whether the smooth skin is more the color of chocolate ice cream or mocha cream cake.

Over the hiss of steam we chat about quitting smoking, and he tells me how his seven months of abstinence came about at the request of his young son. It has been a very hard thing to do, he says, sounding as though he’d say it the same way if his boy’s request had been to move the world, as though anything motivated by love and joy makes its difficulty meaningless.

I ask where he is from.
The lilting joy is joined by inhuman knowledge of sorrow as he answers, Somalia.

He wants to go back, and as he tells me this I feel tears and yearning flood the room, although the dust motes in a slant of afternoon sun float undisturbed in the peaceful space. Not with his son yet, who is too young for a dangerous trip. First he just needs to see, to touch the earth where he watched his mother die. There is no family left there. His surviving brothers are scattered from London to LA. In his gentle voice sing a pantheon of ghosts and a flood of memories …love, hate, pain… while the sweet boy man face remains smooth and calm.

We speak a little of the sorrows of lost family, and of human atrocities too incomprehensible to exist.
When I am paying and preparing to leave, he suddenly looks at me in naked hope, only because, perhaps, I am someone’s mother.
His face follows me for days, soft and gentle …astonishing still.
If I could paint, this gentle face, that bravely showed me a spectrum worthy of Dante over a quiet cup of coffee, would undoubtedly challenge me for months.