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All about the standing-upright chimps that really love to talk about themselves.

Cities and The Future

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It has been a long week.  This repeat from 2010 goes to the physical nature of economic restructuring and where it must come from – our cities.  The recent snow disaster in Atlanta (brilliantly discussed here) is more about infrastructure not keeping up than anything else.  So what do we need?  Let’s start with the basics of what a city is for, and how it will serve us.

Cities mark the landscape across this nation and all others.  Images of the handiwork of a culture often define the people who come to inherit the space and, in turns, mark it with their own generation’s values.  Yet they are so much more than static collections of icons – they are where people come together and live their lives right now.  They are always ultimately about the connections that make them alive.

Even the bricks and mortar or glass and steel is ultimately a connection across time to what made the city what it is today.  Though it’s the stuff that makes up a city which gets photographed and noticed, they are much more than that.

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Head Count or Overhead?

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What are you worth as an employee? A good check for anyone working is to add up what it takes to keep them employed and what their net value is to the company. A strong positive value means job security, something pretty valuable these days. But to do it right, what you cost the company is a lot more than just your salary. There are benefits, like health care and retirement plans, yes. The total cost is far more than even that and it can roughly be called the “overhead per employee”.

By the simplest calculation that’s more than 42% above what you take home, and it could be much more than that. And this overhead is one of the biggest barriers to increasing employment, reducing hours, and generally creating a better quality of life for working people in the US. Not to mention it puts us at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to creating high quality jobs.

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Acts of Destruction

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“Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.”
– Pablo Picasso

Long ago, artists were called on to, more or less, represent the world around them in some form that ennobled the subject at hand.  In the Baroque Era, paintings usually depicted either the ruling class or the saints in ways that made mythologies of power real.  Music was used to provide dignity to a setting or to magnify the glory of God himself to every heart that pounded along with the moment.  Not today.

An artist today is supposed to be someone who pushes the boundaries of our world by creating a new understanding of what it means to be human.  The mythology is something otherwise dormant within us.  That makes the statement by Picasso, a creator and master practitioner of this view of art, even more troublesome.

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The Long Road of Dr. King

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“True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.“
– The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

At this time every year we have the same kind of conversation around the dinner table. My kids are growing up in a different world, one even more thoroughly defined by the struggles and triumphs of Dr. King’s generation than mine was.

But as they grow older, they see the work left to do more plainly. It is disheartening and difficult to watch those who once thought that the old black and white news film of dogs and firehoses was a document of a black and white history – a story of races and realities laid bare for history to pass its judgement. Now that they are in school they’ve seen and heard what racism is. The struggle is still alive, and every year more than just black and white.

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Answers or Questions?

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It’s been a tough week.  We survived -22F temperatures in Minnesota, but still have to go about making a living.  I’m beat.  So please enjoy this repeat from 2010 that I think it still relevant.  Thanks!

A complex world where we have just about any information we want at our fingertips isn’t a world that’s limited by the answers.  It’s limited by our ability to ask the right questions.  That may sound like more sophistry from a wannabe mystic, in case you’re getting tired of my schtick.  But if journalism is about connecting people to their world it seems that the ways it is changing are directly related to the size of the world that people have the ability to connect to.  That might best be handled by changing the entire approach to news.

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