Congratulations! (CC8)

Last Friday as I sat on the plane to Toronto from Kingston I succumbed to reading the Globe and Mail newspaper in an attempt to pass the time. The Globe and Mail front page was covered with economic woe – the lead story screamed “Canada’s commodity engine stalls” and below it was an article titled “Leaders disagree on the severity of the downturn”. Whatever the true depth of the U.S led economic downturn, the domino-like fall of institutions we thought of as bigger, better, brighter and the now widely evident missteps of experts that many regarded as sharper, savvier, smarter seems to have elicited the same uniform message from most public commentators – the assertion that something entirely terrible is unfolding, something with only negative implications. To those of you who may have recently seen the value of your investment portfolio fall my humblest apologizes, but I think this reversal in the upward rise of everything with a dollar value is truly a healthy event.

You see I am convinced that we do not necessarily become better people, richer in character, or more caring citizens of the world in the good times.

It is in the giddiness of the good times that we get experiments in which billions are spent to look back into the forever gone past to attempt to garner the right to boast that man has gained knowledge that previously only God had. So, developed country governments gladly spend billions to discover how the wonder and the magnificence of the world came to be thousands of years ago before Christ, while inflexibly and sometimes scornfully refusing to forgive the debts of countries where, two thousand and eight years after Christ, the standard of living is so low millions of magnificent and wonderful human beings cannot, despite their sincere efforts, see how their next meal is going to come about.

It is in the distorted mirror of the good times that we normal folks tend to lose our perspective. In the good times more is not enough, so millionaires see psychiatrists after the annual publication of the Forbes’ list of the Richest People in the World to deal with the depression of their underachievement. Meanwhile billionaires on their private planes lobby their political representatives to defeat legislation that would ‘waste money’ on educational programs for those who are eager for opportunities that would empower them to live with dignity.

It is in the unrelenting good times that our prosperity brings arrogance rather than gratitude. I recall reading a magazine article by an African-American woman who had become a well-known person. Having built a successful career she subsequently she fell out of graces and hit a very rough patch in her professional life. The part of her story that gripped me was this: she recounted being approached by a struggling male back in the days when she was riding high. He was reaching for guidance, direction, probably even encouragement. She wrote that she responded to him with coldness and righteousness. That he had not yet been successful in securing a job indicated to her that he wasn’t trying hard enough. After all, her life experience to that point was one of generally obtaining what she aimed for. But then her downturn experience came – educated, connected, intelligent, and articulate she nonetheless faced a professional upheaval so deep that her self-confidence and personal psyche were severely shaken. During that time she says she thought of her response to the young male and cried. By the time of the writing of the article her life had recovered from the earthquakes that had rocked it.

I am eternally grateful that she did open her life to me with humility and honesty via the pages of that magazine because her story gave me my personal understanding of why the bible says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Like that African American writer, if the good times last too long we begin to believe we have earned our fortunes without luck or favour, and those missing out have earned their misfortune; we pompously adopt the view that the world is always perfectly fair and we forget our moments of failure and near-misses. If the good times last too long we forget bad things happen to good people just as bad banks happen to good depositors. If the good times last too long the inequities that arise seem to pull those more blessed away from the unifying word “we” and closer to the divisive words “us” and “them”.

So congratulations, the bad times are here! There is a lot to look forward to. Out-of-context, overhyped, poorly laid-out, star-architect building projects like the extension to the Royal Ontario Museum will now get shelved, and with a little patience you may soon be able to buy Citigroup for under $10 (and trust me the people who bought Citi in its last deep crisis made a bundle). Even more exciting, I think the conditions are finally right for a bull market to begin in those intangibles and actions so magnificent and wonderful that their valuation is beyond the pricing mechanism of the financial markets. Actions like Alvaro’s efforts to save lives by evangelizing about blood donor-ship, or Diego’s nurturing of potential by sponsoring a child, or the simple kindness of Cheryl extending an invitation to go sailing.

In preparing this speech I agonized over the visual aids that would best support my point. In the end I could not come up with a visual tool more relevant and powerful than this: YOU. Look around at this Group, each of you with your uncomplicated commitment, volunteerism, and support are building a collective asset with no sales price but of considerable value. My question to each of you is: If I measured the aggregate generosity of this Group today and then returned a year from now, and charted where your generosity stood at both points in time, would the chart fit a speech labelled “Human generosity plummets in the face of weaker economic conditions” or would the chart perfectly complement a speech titled “The spectacular growth in Human generosity continues to defy the trend in the financial markets“.

I close with the challenge that you turn every dollar of decline you may experience in your stock portfolio into an investment in your humanity, your neighbours, your homeland, and your world community. If you can do that, the bad times and good times will all feel like the very best of times.

(October 2008)