Category — better thinking

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

–Henry David Thoreau

(I was going to correct the antiquated "men" here to "mankind" or "(wo)men" or something, but then I realized that it's quite poignant the way it is…the fact that nothing is said about women speaks to their even quieter desperation, in a way.  So, left Thoreau alone on that one for now.  I'll make up for it with an upcoming project, promise.)

(Thank you to my longtime friend and first wife Adam for the quote, too.)

[Click here for Part One]

OK, just a note here to say that underwater hockey (or UWH as you'll see it abbreviated) is stone cold freaking awesome.  I don't even like competitive sports generally, but I've now played this one for about five months and I wouldn't give it up for anything; I *love* it and I look forward to every single practice.  I am learning that the US is generally a very poor location for UWH; Europe and Australia seem to have the really good teams, so if you live in those places, that's even more reason to go check it out!  (Though if you live in the US, join and support a local team like I did; they need you!  ;)

Since it unfortunately also wakes me up (and no, I don't know why; it's quite exhausting at the time), and I haven't yet wound down from tonight's training enough to sleep, here's the short list of UWH's many awesomenesses:

• Stellar sportsmanship, at least on all the teams I've played with — there's friendly competition, sure, but violence, cheating, and being an asshole to people are uniformly and consistently discouraged
• Nice opportunity, at least, for gender balance — the game is definitely not in any way easier if you're male, and in countries-that-are-not-the-U.S. there are plenty of mixed as well as women-only leagues.  (I'm not generally a fan of women-only leagues, because ahem that's called separate-but-equal and it doesn't work, but it's nice that there are enough women players in many places to warrant them.)  The teams I play with are all cross-gender, and especially considering the possibility for problems that you'd expect in a swimming sport, they all handle it *beautifully*.  I've never seen a single instance of harassment or anything like it.
• Lots of ways to be good at it:  Swimming fast, having great endurance, having a long breath-hold, stick-finesse, and having a good brain for positioning can each make you a great player, and whatever you're good at, you've got something to work on, too.
• Freaking awesome exercise.  Many recreational sports are actually "eh" when it comes to getting and keeping you in shape, but you can NOT beat swimming your butt off in a fast-paced environment that keeps challenging you to push your limits and is never ever boring.
• Great intellectual challenge!  Stick-work is really difficult to get right and amazing to watch when people can do it; and the usual positioning and teamwork of regular hockey is *mega* harder when you're trying to anticipate yours and your teammates breath-hold times and rotations from the surface to the bottom of the pool.  Add occasional other twists like pools with "deep ends", slopes, etc., and it's like the fastest-moving chess you ever saw.

…And hopefully that is enough to get me started on my way to bed (having eaten something will help I think; I finish hockey practices hungry, but man the food you get afterwards is some of the best food you'll ever eat — one of my favorite things about swimming in general; do enough of it and you work up the best hunger ever).  Hope everybody's having a great week!

PD

[P.S.  Because I am insane and the scheduling couldn't be worked out better, I also have my kungfu/taiji lesson early tomorrow morning -- so hockey kills my evening nap and then kungfu wipes me out in the morning -- augh!  This is definitely resulting in my finishing Fridays a bit short of sleep, but I've been letting myself sleep in on Saturday to make up for it, and that's been working.  More postage (?) on exercise & napping lately, but this post warranted a note to say "yeah, hockey does sometimes mess with my sleep, but at least so far it's workable".]

This topic has been on my mind a lot lately for…various reasons, we'll say.  For background, I myself am a smart person (we can define that later if you like, but if you care about definitions then you're probably smart enough to qualify ;), and I'm pretty sure I've had every single self-esteem problem in the book, or damn close.  I've crawled my way out of bad relationships, bad habits (including outright self-harm), and bad situations all caused by my lack of self-love/esteem/confidence more times than I really care to admit.  But you don't do things like that without learning something, and if it's ok with you, Internet, I'd love a chance to share what I've learned.  I'm calling this Part One because I see a potential for a lot to talk about here, and depending on Life, the Universe and Everything I may or may not write it all, but I at least want to have said some of this stuff — Ideally, I'd like to talk with some people about it, too, so feel free to chime in if this speaks to you.

Obviously I'm not a psychologist — you can take that as a detriment if you like, but personally I'm proud of it; and anyway if this advice doesn't stand on its own, then you should ignore it.  You're smart.

I.  Recognize what Self-Esteem is and Why It's Important.  Self-Esteem got a bad rap when people turned it into a bullet-point fix-all buzz-word bullshit answer to The Everything, but ignore all that and think about what it means:  It means not hating yourself.  Not experiencing your whole life through the filter of a constant buzz of negative thinking, the equivalent of having a whole roomful of people dissing and hating on you all day, every day, except that since it's you doing it to yourself, the dissing is amazingly pinpoint accurate and blisteringly hard to ignore by just gutsing your way through it.  Bad self-esteem is a handicap, a mental problem that not only prevents you from making the most out of your life, but that steers you inexorably into self-destructive behaviors and situations, and impairs your ability to make the kind of decisions you actually want to make probably worse than anything short of PCP.  (If that sounded overly dramatic, think about it again:  Would you rather be drunk and trying to make a long-term series of life-decisions in a positive way, or face the same decisions while possessed by demons that could trick you into thinking that you wanted and deserved what was worst for you?)

If you're smart, you are self-aware and therefore have a strong interest in fixing your self-esteem.  (Maybe you aren't convinced that you can fix it, but put that on hold for the moment; I'll prove it soon.)  If you're not sure whether you have a self-esteem problem, do this simple test:  Watch your thinking as closely as you can for a day, and note (with a mark on paper or something) how many times you think something negative about yourself, versus how many times you think something positive.  Doing this exercise will probably cause you to think extra positive things about yourself for that day, but that can be instructive too:  How hard is it?  How weird does it feel?  For me, for a long time even trying to honestly think something like, "because I'm awesome is why" was really, really hard, and I could tell I was faking it even while I did it.  You may not be (hopefully aren't) that bad off, but if you're not sure it's really worth watching and keeping track for a day.  This problem can be stealthy, since obviously it has a vested interest in hiding itself from your logical mind.  (And that's not an anthropomorphization or dramatization either:  It's a mental construct, and it's just as cagey as the rest of your mind can be.  Are you smart enough to lie not to get caught?  Then so is it.)

Self-esteem comes from two things:  Having accomplished things that you yourself are proud of, and having your basic needs met.  Think of this as the emotional side of the coin that "being physically fit" is the physical side of:  To be physically fit, you have to a) meet your basic health needs, and b) successfully accomplish some kind of physical exercise.  To have self-esteem, you have to a) meet your basic emotional needs, and b) successfully accomplish some kind of emotional growth.  

I'm going to start with basic needs, because as with the physical version, this often gets overlooked, and it's flat fucking stupid to overlook it.  You cannot be physically fit if you're fundamentally unhealthy:  Even if you manage to fake it for a while, it'll fall apart on you, guaranteed.  And being fit isn't about looking muscular; it's about strength, resiliency, and successfully being in the world in a positive way.  Same thing with self-esteem:  Faking it is not making it.  The basics are utterly essential.  

"OK," I can hear the DA in my head saying, "But it's a lot harder with emotional needs.  First you have to know what they are, and that's different for everybody, and and and…" –But I argue in return that it's not all that different, nor that much (if any) harder.  There are basic truths that apply in pretty much every case, and the process of finding out the specifics of what works for you is pretty much the same as it is with diet and exercise:  Try things that make sense, watch yourself to learn the results, keep what you're doing or change it based on the evidence, rinse repeat.  

However, we shouldn't overlook that we're talking about people doing this who already have bad self-esteem:  How do you figure out and meet your basic emotional needs when a part, maybe a large part, of your mind insists that you don't deserve to have them?  Well, you have some bad habits to get around in that case, but it's not impossible, and it's as worth doing as eating right and exercising is for the very physically unfit.  

This is long already, but I'll keep going for a bit, to discuss the first basic step in overcoming poor self-esteem enough to learn what your basic emotional needs are and how to get them met:

II.  First, recognize that your basic emotional needs are YOUR responsibility.  That's advice that most people like myself will find both easy and hard:  It's easy because it sounds unwhiny and self-reliant (or comfortingly self-punishing, depending on where you are on the scale of things); it's hard because it means that you have to admit that your own pain and suffering deserves your attention and effort to fix — and really fix, not just cover up well enough that you can function/behave for others.  

Funnily enough though, this easy/hard impression that you get from admitting that your low self-esteem is a problem that's your responsibility to fix is actually somewhat backwards from reality — and that's precisely because of the filters that low self-esteem puts over things like this.  In your mind, you're probably trying to "be tough" and "suck it up" and "not be dramatic" … but in reality, the effect of this is that you aren't getting your needs met, and this is causing you to lean on other people inappropriately, to "wait on" someone else to recognize what you need and make it a priority.  In essence, by absconding responsibility for identifying and prioritizing your needs, you wind up unfairly putting that burden on others — because the assumption you're making, that it's ok to just let yourself be trampled since you don't deserve better anyway, is a fallacious one; letting your own needs go unmet *isn't an option*.  You're a human being and you have needs, and your mind and body will seek to have them met even if you don't.  (That's why they're NEEDS.)  

It's easy to be ashamed of having needs, or to see them as weaknesses — I understand that urge, and I also don't think it comes from a bad place.  We want to be strong and independent.  But a strong person knows their limits and works with them:  We don't admire people who go hiking in the mountains with no food, water or gear and get themselves killed.  Some of your needs will turn out to be things you don't need all the time, or don't need very much of; and some of them will turn out to be like air.  That's ok; as long as you know which is which, you can make decisions accordingly.  And knowing that you need something and making decisions that respect that is a ton more responsible and "tough" than ignoring what you need and flailing all over the place because you're not able to breathe.

I won't lie:  You won't be happy about some of the things you need.  Especially if you have a life built, or partly built, already, you're likely to find that thanks to your lack of self-esteem, you didn't do a great job with some of the bits you built, and may have to make some uncomfortable decisions.  But remember that simply not having your needs met isn't an option:  Things you built that directly interfere with those basic needs will eventually fall apart anyway, so it's not like you're saving yourself any pain by not learning what you did wrong.  

Like your physical needs, your emotional needs will change over the course of your life.  Feeling bad about this is about as intelligent as apologizing because you no longer like to eat fistfuls of candy like you did when you were a kid.

So, let's recap:

1.  Self-esteem is important as hell, no matter how sick of the term we've all gotten.  It comes from the right kind of accomplishments, which we'll cover next time, and from having your basic emotional needs met, which we'll also talk about doing in more detail when my fingers uncramp.  ;)

2.  The first step towards getting your basic emotional needs met is to recognize that it's your responsibility to do so, and that if you don't do it, the problem won't simply go away.  (Think about people who think that they can just eat unhealthy food and sit on the couch all the time, and get away with it.  Same genius at work, there.)  Your emotional needs are needs, and if you don't take responsibility for identifying and meeting them, you will unconsciously ruin your life and probably all your relationships too, trying to get them met in other ways.  

Stay tuned for Part Two!

"Love suffers long and is kind;
Love does not envy;
Love does not parade itself, is not puffed up;
does not behave rudely,
does not seek its own,
is not provoked, thinks no evil…"

(I'll leave the attribution as an interesting exercise for the reader.)

(Because why not, right?)

…When you're actually in the middle of having one of the worst weeks you can remember.

Sorry about the lack of posts, ya'll; I've just been trying to keep the whining and flailing and FML-ing off of this site, because well, what good does it do?  I have other places to just vent at, and even then, the only real purpose of it is to keep me from shutting down and turning inwards and giving the world the finger.  (Which I would happily do at this point, except that then I wouldn't get anything *done*; I'd just stay in bed and rot.  And I'll take venting and flailing over that kind of depression any day, thank you.)

Change and cycles are necessary and inevitable, and the ego needs to let go of the delusion that it's in control of them…sometimes things fall apart because they needed to.  Philosophically I'm fine with this truth, though of course it's hard for me emotionally like it is for anybody.  Know the truth and it will set you free — not necessarily without pain, of course.

So I'd be having a hard enough time with that as it is, but the Universe then decided that this week, ALL of the things that give me comfort and joy should also go away, leaving me in the dark presumably so that I can more fully experience The Suck that it has laid out for me.  All week it's just been difficult conversations, boredom (you know how I bloody hate boredom), frustrated plans, being stuck outside in the cold, and having too much time either alone and dwelling on things, or in company where I have to keep a game face on no matter how much I don't feel like it.  All my usual activities and pleasures are unavailable or fell through, and it's been entirely up to me to entertain myself, stay busy, and stay positive.

And to be fair, I've done pretty well overall.  Today, though, I'm feeling totally out of energy for it, and I don't know where I'll get more.  Every day I've managed to find something — a nice view, a good read, a moment of appreciation for something — but man have I been running on fumes for a while now, and I'm really starting to despair that I'll ever catch a break.  Of course I will — that's how cycles work, after all — but that despair is itself dangerous and potentially destructive, and I really need to keep it off, or this downturn will eat through a lot more things than are actually ready to end.

That part's up to me.  "I have come to the disturbing conclusion that I am the deciding factor," as Goethe said.  And it may feel like day after day of using up the things that help me has left me bare in a lashing wind, but that's not accurate either.  The tools are always at hand, if you know how to look.  I'll figure it out.

Right?  Right!

More when things are better…

NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no 

STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID *DUMB*

…And I imagine that that, in combination with what you're seeing everywhere else today, is Nuff Said, yeah?

(If not, poke me via any means and I'll happily elucidate the NO and the STUPID as much as you like.)

[[one last big FACEPALM for the government of the country that built the Internet, for being too bought-and-paid-for to bother even understanding the basics of how not to break it.  *SHEESH*]]

(No, that question wasn't meant to sound filthy, but bonus points to you if it did I guess.  ;)

I've been thinking a lot about that "last inch" lately — the immediate reference in my mind is to V for Vendetta, but it goes farther than that – and yes, times are crazy, as tend to be those that spur such thinking.  Here are some of those thoughts, and of course I'm interested in hearing yours, too.

• The last inch is maybe the first inch, in the sense that it's the first inch of power-cord after the place where you plug into the Source.  It's where the power is the most pure, and also the one remaining piece you need to have in order to say you ex-ist (literally, protrude out into the world of form).
• The last inch is where your mandates for living come from:  Think of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (and read it if you haven't!), where he asks the young poet to dive down to the part of himself that is essentially, irrevocably alone, and ask it:  Must I write?  (Or "Must I [whatever]?")  If the last inch says yes, then that's not an optional part of life for you; it's part of how your connection to Life (the force) is defined.  In my mind this is similar to asking the coupling on a fiber connection, "Must it be pulses of light?" For someone else — a Cat5-person perhaps — the answer to that wouldn't be "yes, it must"; but if your interface demands it, it must.
• Expanding on that, you can't give away your last inch unless your intent is to give away life, the Universe and everything; and to do that is suicide, so you'd generally better not!  …But if you don't recognize what your last inch is composed of, you may not recognize that you shouldn't offer it up, for someone else, or in exchange for something you really want.  The last inch is dangerous if it's unknown I think.
• Back to "fiber people" and "copper people"…Rilke says that there's a place inside each of us where we're totally alone, and I agree with that — we all go there in the moments before death, at least — but I think for some of us it's our last inch, and for others it isn't.  Some people are made to be bundled — most of them, actually.  But while communication is an essential part of life for almost all of us — what good is a totally isolated interface? — for some of us, a certain amount of insulation is necessary.  We are, perhaps, sensitive to interference, right in that most delicate of places; right where we plug in.

Your last inch can keep you alive, keep you going in the face of amazing adversity, if you know where it is.  And if you don't know where it is and what it requires to function, you can accidentally damage it, which is the spiritual equivalent of damaging your lungs.  

I have time to catch up on projects this weekend, and one that I'm spending a lot of time with is my last inch…when you next get the chance, I recommend this activity highly…while at the same time slapping an NC-17 on it, because good fracking oil-earthquakes is it scary!  ;)

My friend Scott K., who is a regular spouter of wisdom, recently shared with me this gem from a conversation he had with someone who was attempting to — hold your breath for this one — support the Randian "philosophy" espoused in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  I'm thrilled to re-post his arguments here, because a) they're very good, if not exactly what my slightly-more-cynical self would say; and b) I hate writing about Rand myself because it just makes me froth – on a very real level I don't think her "arguments" are even worth taking seriously enough to rebut, so I just go all OMG ARE YOU SERIOUS MORON at people who defend them.  Scott does a much better job of giving real answers, and not only are they patient and accurate, but I can totally get behind his thinking, which is based pretty firmly in the Golden Rule.  Go, Scott!  ;)

[I can't speak to the veracity of Sergio Marchionne's speech yet, but Scott was nice enough to score me a bit of it, so perhaps -- assuming it's less rage-inducing than Rand, heh -- I'll address that bit separately later.  Also, all the emphases below are mine. --PD]

When I read Atlas Shrugged, I felt like Rand was completely overlooking how we have come to this state of society – we all work together to make a better place, and we pass that down not just to our own children, but to everyone.  I owe (along with those lost to history) those people who decided to build our national infrastructure of roads using public money, which changed the fate of our country in incredible ways.  I owe the people who determined that my mom didn't have to pay taxes because she didn't make enough to buy me shoes as a baby, because I would not be where I am now if she wasn't given the chance to succeed.  She never accepted welfare, but it wasn't because she wasn't eligible.



On a personal level, I think that while my success in life is certainly not possible without my own efforts, it is also a matter of blind luck at having been born where, when, and to whom I was born to, and that if I didn't have the benefits I did not earn before I was of working age, I would be in significant trouble.  



I am proud of the things I have done and the person I have tried to be, but our country does not owe me – I owe it.  And I think that everyone else who has driven on public roads, enjoyed greenery that would otherwise be developed, has flouridated water, and enjoys vehicles that get more than 10 miles to the gallon also owe those people.  I can't pay it back to them, so I pay it forward.



Everyone in society benefits from keeping people healthy and educated.  Whether they deserve it or not, whether they have worked hard for it or not, allowing people to wallow in their miserable, painful lives until their untimely death does not help our GDP, and it is not moving forward toward a society I want to be in.  It is not in our self-interest as a nation to not take care of our own, unless you subscribe to the brutal eugenics some people mistake for natural selection, and in that case, it is a step too far for me.  The people Atlas Shrugged would reject are human beings as valid as any 'hard worker' is, with just as much of a right to exist (ethically speaking).



If a small portion of my income goes to someone who buys twinkies as their only source of pleasure and sustenance, I don't care.  It is a very small price to pay for having the opportunity to be college-educated, to work in a comfortable office, to make more money than I need to survive, to have medical insurance, to be able to get in my car and drive anywhere in this entire country I want to go, at my own whim, when other people are literally incapable of leaving the city because they can't afford the time off, the gas, or car.  I have friends who can loan me cash if I need it, family who can take me in if I'm suddenly unemployed, and I live in a society that will help me pay my bills because it is better for me to find a job and continue to contribute than to lose me forever.



I would prefer for there not to be waste or greed or corruption, but this is the real world, and just like communism is a failure (by its own rules) due to human greed, strict and total free market capitalism is a societal failure due to the corruption and greed of individuals.  People do NOT behave in their best long-term interest, and corporations don't either – they behave in ways that are best for the short-term gain of their stockholders, to the folly of future generations.  No offense to stockholders. ;)



I accept that I worked hard for money that will go toward some things I do not desire and would not choose.  I think the fear that other people might get something that they don't deserve when we're talking about a block of cheese or a flu shot, is cruel and sad.  That doesn't mean I won't stand up and make my opinions known, or try to influence my politicians toward where I think my money should be spent.



There are also people who work their asses off, put themselves through college, get laid off through no fault of their own, become homeless, and die due to those conditions.  I know of no technique to determine the difference between those who "deserve" charity and those who do not with 100% certainty.  Either way, though, I have it so, so much better than so many people in this world, both through skill and luck, and I think it is ridiculous hubris for me to think that I should not be contributing to my community and society.  I don't believe in God, but the phrase "There but for the grace of God go I" has rung through my head ever since (yes, I'm invoking her) my grandmother said it to me, and I try to always keep it in mind.  [I love that phrase; I just shorten it to "There but for Grace go I".  However, keeping God in it is a nice reminder to Christians, I think, that in spite of what most Megachurches will tell you nowadays, God does not in fact ensure that all the people he likes are born white and wealthy as a reward for their awesomeness, and Jesus was pretty clear about making sure that everyone is taken care of, whether you think they deserve it or not.  And speaking of deserving things, people who claim to be Christian and Randian deserve to explode in a flaming gout of poor reading comprehension.  -PD]



I believe in the power of capitalism to move society forward, just as I believe that someone with power -must- represent those interests that are -NOT- met by money alone.  [And I totally want to discuss this bit more with Scott, because I'm not sure I do believe it...but I love him and I respect his opinions enough to post all of them.  ;)]

Sergio Marchionne, the CEO of Chrysler and Fiat, had a few things to say about what's going on right now and what impact it has on business at a conference recently.  He is one of the most incredibly successful CEOs to exist in this generation, having brought back companies from the brink of death, and I believe firmly in the things he said.



He ended his speech with this: "This is a story of revitalization in a company that was regarded as irrelevant, set in a city that had been disparaged as a failure.  It is just one example of how impossible feats of recovery can be achieved if we work together in good faith, realizing that we have a stake in each other's success."