Really, Pretty Centrist

I am a self-described moderate but people who know me say I can sound “pretty liberal.”

But a core of regressives in our state legislature as well as in the U.S Congress make moderates and even true conservatives sound liberal.

In truth, I get exasperated with a tendency by some liberals to sound as though they are always trying to absolve groups and individuals of personal accountability.

An example is a story last week on New Republic by Dana Goldstein entitled, Inexcusable Absences about some truancy laws that hold parents accountable.

My concern as I read the recent DOJ report on the police department in Ferguson, Missouri, is that as a society we have an obsession now with institutional accountability.  That blinds us to an even more significant underlying problems in neighborhoods and homes.

In fact, there is ample evidence that even the problems of some individuals within institutions can be traced back to the homes and neighborhoods where they were raised.

But if you get “bleeding heart” beginning of Goldstein’s story, she makes several very valid data-driven points about how we can institutionally deal better deal with truancy institutionally, but few to enlighten societal interventions at home.

Okay, am I sounding moderate enough now?

I may have dismissed the article too soon had I not read Goldstein’s phenomenal book recently entitled The Teacher Wars, a well-written and documented overview of 175 years of American education.

It was particularly enlightening when read, as I did, in tandem with the just published revision of The Libertarian Mind written by David Boaz.  There is actually more agreement than people who only judge them by their titles might think.

This country was founded by liberals and libertarians who did not see those outlooks as incompatible.

The Teacher Wars illustrates just how old, tired and ineffective the polices are that are now being rehashed by regressives elected to high office across the country.  The far right still fails to grasp that we are not all born equal.

The book also illustrates how misguided teacher unions have been to shield unengaged teachers from consequences.

The Libertarian Mind brought to mind a friend I see on occasion frequenting a restaurant in our neighborhood.  Get him started and he will spend all the time you have and more explaining how the federal government is to blame for the collapses that brought about the Great Recession.

He has a point but fails to grasp that it is the free market that fails to incorporate the full cost of its actions into a fully sustainable cycle, instead pushing what are called negative externalities off onto society.

Taking responsibility for consequences is also a theme in The Libertarian Mind whose adherents would probably agree with the right of Michael Brown’s parents to sue the Ferguson Police Department as a rightful consequence.

But it is much more complex when consequences are enforced on poor parenting or neglectful neighbors and landlords or on personal behavior regardless of circumstances.

This is also an area today’s liberals avoid, seeming instead to absolve consequences by viewing personal responsibility through the lens of victims of circumstance such as objecting to work requirements for safety net benefits even though those were required when the nets were first erected, ironically by liberals.

Everything seems to revolve around that pesky little issue of free will.  Libertarians seem to reject any other influence and liberals often seem to sweep away free will altogether.

The sticky wicket seems to be what is blameworthy.

But none of us has been held entirely responsible for each of our actions so criminalizing poor or inadequate parenting may not ensure personal accountability either and certainly doesn’t seem fair or consistent with any of the world’s spiritual cultures.

Consequentialism and Communitarianism, are to me at the opposite ends of a spectrum, one seeming to view the world only through individual responsibility and the other viewing responsibility as a result of community interactions rather than personal behavior.

So there too, I find myself clinging as a centrist, though as I get older liberals probably see me as “pretty conservative” and my more conservative friends see me as “pretty liberal.”

An Unsung Hero

There were only three of us who knew the untold story behind how Durham, North Carolina saved the Bulls.  Now only two of us remain and it is time for me to keep a promise.

Legends are a type of myth that combines fact and fiction in a way that re-harmonizes or re-narrates stories to contemporize them.  This is how villains become heroes and prodigal sons are redeemed.

This happened to the story of how Durham saved its beloved Bulls baseball club, even official accounts and with news stories often quoting people who were not yet in the room.

My purpose in fulfilling this promise to the late Chuck Grubb is not to set the legend straight.  The story as re-narrated is still worthy and the heroes as recast well deserving.

Chuck wanted a fragment of fingerprint left so that generations to come, when harmonizing is less important than it is today, will have some sense of just how close Durham was to losing the team and how the actions of a very few turned that around.

He asked me because I was there from the beginning and the only one of the three of us still living from that time who has remained rooted in Durham.

My role was extremely minor, even reactive. 

My chronicle begins when Chuck brought three of us together after a disheartening meeting took place on March 16. 1990.

That meeting had been less than 24 hours after voters had narrowly rejected a proposal intended to keep the soon-to-be new owner of the Bulls from moving the team from Downtown Durham to a location in Raleigh across the county line.

It had included a few others representing the city, county, chamber of commerce, the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) and one or two others.

It would be three more years before Downtown Durham Inc. would exist.

The meeting was short.  Everyone was exhausted, angry and out of ideas. The consensus of those who could bear to talk believed the cause was lost and wanted to give up.

I had been in Durham less than 9 months, recruited to jumpstart DCVB, Durham’s first official community marketing organization, an organization intended to become, in part, the guardian of sense of place including assets such as the Bulls.

While at the table, it was too soon to be able to fill that role.

Heavily spending to narrowly sway Durham voters against a stadium proposal, the new owner from Raleigh had commitments there to use prepared food tax revenues, newly granted by the state, but denied Durham, to build a new home for the Bulls.

Soon he would complete an option to buy the Bulls.

As purely a business venture, it was reasonable even though a college student survey project of fans had shown that even fans from Raleigh would be less likely to attend without the authentic, warehouse setting of the old Bulls ballpark in Durham.

Chuck would say I called him.  I thought it was the other way around but we talked later that day and agreed to meet.  I brought along one of my new stakeholders who had been calling me repeatedly about what our fledgling organization could do and encouraging me not to give up.

Ray Hobbs, who after all these years still keeps in touch from time to time had returned to Durham as a hotelier six months after I arrived.  He had traveled here first as a kid when his father was undergoing treatment at Duke.

Ray had previously managed another hotel in Durham in the mid-1980s as Miles Wolfe was resurrecting the Bulls and simultaneously Minor League Baseball overall.

But when I arrived in 1989, Ray was managing a hotel down in Raleigh, while trying to make his way back to Durham.  There he had got to know another hotelier named Hobbs, Jim, but no relation.

When Chuck and I met that day with Ray, I was still far too green to know my way around or what to do, but Ray offered one last “Hail Mary.”

He volunteered to check with Raleigh hoteliers to see how they felt about the new prepared food tax being used to poach tourism assets from other communities.

He found it didn’t set well at all but then as now any real organizational clout of hotels had migrated from local and state to the national level.

But soon the “Hobbs boys” as he calls them connected with T. Jerry Williams who then-headed the powerful North Carolina Restaurant Association and whose ascent had paved the way for Raleigh and Charlotte and their respective counties to have the new food tax.

The “Hobbs boys,” with DCVB cranking out form letters for hoteliers and restaurateurs in both Durham and Raleigh to use, began a letter writing campaign to legislators protesting misuse of the tax to poach the Bulls, while serious threats of a lawsuit were made.

The joint publicity campaign worked.  Raleigh officials, fearful the food tax would be repealed, withdrew the stadium funding.

It is our fault that this part of the narrative is now lost.

Once a turning point is achieved and a change of course seems imminent, anyone behind the scenes in a controversy is usually on pins and needles to ensure redemption of those involved.

The owner of the Bulls now jokingly tells audiences that he was the first to call and offer an olive branch to Durham officials because they were saying such nasty things in public about him.

I recall that Chuck made that call.  But what matters most is that these two individuals became friends and began to work together on a new stadium proposal in Durham resulting in the Durham Bulls Athletic Park (DBAP.)

Ray soon moved on to manage hotels in other communities, eventually heading a chain in the Caribbean and becoming a sought after consultant.

A few years later, the owner of the Bulls called me down to where he was sitting along the first base line during a game with his then-corporate counsel and quizzed me about who owned the old, abandoned Lucky Strike Factory across the street.

Today, DBAP is part of over $100 million in public infrastructure invested in the district encompassing it, while the Bull’s owner has leveraged even more than that amount including invaluable historic tax credits to create a showcase of adaptive reuse that the owner calls the American Tobacco Complex surrounded by newer office buildings and soon a new hotel.

Oh, and the historic Durham Athletic Park that had been home to the Bulls on the other side of downtown since the 1930s and favored by voters who had turned down a new stadium. It has been nicely renovated and serves as home to the NCCU Eagles.

To illustrate how far people will go to re-harmonize a story, a few years ago, until corrected, a person speaking to a group of Minor League Officials went so far as to intimate that the Bulls had built the DBAP to save Durham, completely inverting what actually took place.

This is how legends evolve.

Legends are a form of folklore.  They are ways people make meaning of their lives.  It is a natural form of healing and redemption that stories such as this are re-narrated and harmonized over time.

Heroes are evolved over time to reflect changing cultural values.

Dr. Lynnette Porter, author of several books about heroes, reminds us that King Arthur is an example of a “literary hero who has been reconstructed over time.”  Others such as Galadriel, a royal elf in The Lord of the Rings, worked behind the scenes for world salvation.

So it is equally important that future generations understand complexities and never forget the crucial but quiet, unsung contributions of heroic individuals at pivotal points in a community’s history.

In time, I suspect Ray Hobb’s contribution to Durham’s story will be rewoven back into the narrative of how Durham saved the Bulls.

The Resiliency of Today’s Student Traveler

Bacchanalia grabs all of the headlines about spring break for colleges giving a distorted view of student travel, especially as it has evolved over the past decade.

According to analysis of various studies published recently in a white paper by Skift and StudentUniverse, student travel now represents “fully one-fifth of all International arrivals” in the travel sector and they go “far beyond the backpack-and-party crowd.”

In fact, history and culture rank as more important than parties for both males and females.  Of relief to parents of young daughters, several other experiences including local food rank higher than parties and nightlife.

Significantly, by more than three to one, females would have still traveled even without those social gatherings.

I found it interesting that 60% of this travel is female, and families pick up just over a third of the cost.  The students come from more than 4,100 public and private colleges.

Nothing replaces experience in the workforce during college but it is interesting that 97% of these student travelers felt the trip improved their self-confidence, and 99% believed the travel provided insights to personal strengths and weaknesses.

Nearly 9-in-10 of the student travelers surveyed felt the trip helped them get a job.

I had just turned 19 when I took my first cross country plane trip from my native Rockies in 1967.  I wasn’t ready yet, physically or emotionally, to make the most of my trip to Western Europe.

My daughter studied there for several months in high school and returned during her college years.

Students today are even more prepared for these experiences than either me or even my daughter were.

Of course, mobile devices are a game-changer.  My daughter, who is now the single mother of two grandsons and a chief privacy and ethics officer, often marvels with me at what it would have been like to have that access while she was growing up.

By 2020, the market value of this type of travel will reach $320 billion with U.S. destinations being equal beneficiaries of those inbound to this country.

Important to note is that student travelers are more than three times as likely to use various Internet devices for in-destination information as they are local hosts.

Today’s student travelers are also more resilient when it comes to “terrorism, political and social unrest, disease and natural disasters” requiring helicopter parents to lighten up.

The Significance of Planning One’s Own Funeral

Funerals I’ve attended over the past month have motivated me to leave a list of instructions about my own when the comes.

My mother’s took place the week she would have turned 86 years old.  Even in pain for many years and nearly blind for more than two decades, she worked hard to make sure her affairs were in order.

She left explicit instructions on how and where she wanted to buried, including the type of service, a favorite hymn and her headstone, along with an insurance policy to cover the costs.

Included with her will and health care directive was even a handwritten note reminding us to cancel auto-shipments of shampoo from the cable television shopping channel, QVC, where I am sure she was well known (smile.)

In true form, she had thought of everything.  Thankfully, she lived long enough to think through the details of her funeral.

As I always thought too, many people thought my mom was an extrovert but her funeral wishes suggest she leaned more to being an introvert.

In contrast, an even more recent funeral was for a former co-worker who died suddenly at only age 38.  I have no idea if he left instructions, but due to his young age, I doubt it.

He was a bigger than life personality and was assumed by many to be an extrovert.

But based on our years of working together and humorous comments he made through the years, my guess is that he leaned toward being an introvert on that scale.

Without our wishes documented and given to guardians, it’s anyone’s guess as to what kind of funeral will be planned, particularly when well meaning extroverts get involved.

Note to self!

The scientific meaning of those classifications have been perverted over the years, even in some dictionary definitions.  Extrovert and introvert have nothing to do with being outgoing or shy.

Based on the research that coined the terms as well as follow up studies, these descriptions have to do with how we get or distribute energy and how quickly we dial up.

Click here for an excellent overview including how people who fall under each description can respect the needs of someone at the other end of the scale or even those who seemingly straddle the line such as me, ambiverts.

Extroverts get energy from people while introverts give energy to others.  Extroverts lose energy when they are alone and need social interaction for restoration.

Introverts give off energy in social settings and need down time or alone time to recharge, often side by side with someone who understands and respects that.

Extroverts arouse more slowly while introverts arouse quickly which is why too much stimulation for them is exhausting.  So when extroverts are barely getting warmed up and siphoning more and more energy, having been depleted, introverts are coming in for a landing.

Stimulation even takes different pathways in the brains of extroverts and introverts explaining, in part, why the former is more subject to risky behaviors including management decisions.

Extroverts get their “life of the party” or “never met a stranger” reputation because they get, need and constantly seek energy from people.

Introverts get a reputation for being shy because they are better listeners and because their energy gets depleted in social situations not because they don’t enjoy them.

Both are equally at ease in public settings and roles.  Introverts tend to be more regulated and know when enough is enough.  Places of worship and social or service clubs must curb extroverts or risk driving introverts away.

I suspect that my own spirituality is best served in tranquil, natural settings is a give-away.  When I was president of a Rotary Club, extraverts always made it a challenge to keep meetings on time.

To an extravert, a brief announcement can turn into a ten minute performance as they get energized by the crowd.

The fact that service clubs, in particular, are often dominated by extroverts is one of the reasons found in studies showing that more and more people now prefer to seek “one off” causes for service involvement rather than joining those that are perpetual.

You can also tell a lot about which end of that spectrum someone falls by the type of funeral arrangements they specify.

I used to kid my daughter and sisters when I was much younger that at my funeral, they could just play B.B. King’s The Thrill Is Gone and scatter my ashes over my native Tetons, signaling that I tilt toward introvert and don’t want a long drawn-out funeral.

I guess I need to update those comments and record some more specifics.

Funerals are for the living, but maybe the greatest way to respect someone who has passed is to grieve our loss in the way they would have wanted, regardless of our own preferences for grieving.

So note to self: even though I have no immediate plans for dying, now is the time to think through what I want and then communicate it to a trusted guardian.

And for anyone who thinks they are too young to think about this, do it for loved ones.

The Twin Threats of Commodification and Blandification

After hearing one of my lectures a week ago at Appalachian State University, a bright, young, upper level hospitality student stopped to ask me a question.

She wondered if now that many cities, including some nearby, have developed local restaurant scenes if the one in Durham where I still live after concluding a career in community marketing would experience leakage.

Durham’s foodie reputation first evolved with a colony of chef-owned restaurants in the early 1980s and has regularly been nationally-acclaimed since the 1990s, most recently garnering the community “Tastiest Town In The South”.

Normally, leakage refers to import leakage, what occurs when, for example, visitors to a community are somehow misdirected to another community for something available locally or when businesses hire non-residents and those wages are not spent work-side.

This is called leakage because it reduces the value added to the local economy.

Due to a consumer behavior known as cognitive distance friction, visitors rarely range further than seven miles even within a destination let alone venture a 20-60 mile round trip to do something in another city they could do where they are.

That is, unless they are misdirected by someone which is why DMOs must constantly train and retrain front line workers who are commuters from another city.

Otherwise, they recommend what they know, even if it means sending an unsuspecting visitor on a 30 mile jaunt to eat.

In this instance, I took it that the student wondered if Durham’s ability to reap dividends from its vaunted food scene would be reduced when day-trip visitors stayed home to dine instead, creating the impact of “retained tourism” in those places.

The short answer to the question is there will be little if any leakage at least in the manner I suspect she was using the term.

However, there are other threats that may undermine the ability of communities everywhere to leverage a local food scene as a point of differentiation and appeal.

Local food scenes involve more than acclaimed chefs, culinary artisans and restaurants.  These aspects thrive when integrated into the destination overall in a way that seems organic and natural.

Foodies travel as much for the sense of the place surrounding restaurants as they do for the food itself.  Durham’s food scene will continue to thrive if community policy makers, advocates and developers focus on preserving community character.

By community character, I mean those place-based assets including cultural, environmental and built, that when woven together make a community distinctive, not because they are unique in and of themselves but because they are distinct in the way they are manifest.

Loss of sense of place also occurs by becoming too “resort-ish” or cute, or when organic districts are overrun by chains and other mainstream elements.

This is a far greater threat than competition from other communities, especially when these more generic elements try to cannibalize or dominate a community’s overall story which they often try to do.

Both a unique sense of place and community destination marketing that seeks to foster and protect it are about “differentiation,” the antithesis of communities that seek instead to be mainstream, a sure path to blandification.

Being mainstream refers not only to chains but to sports and cultural facilities, including events that can be found in scores of other communities, if not hundreds and thousands.

In business, there is an outcome called commoditization.  It is the opposite of differentiation.

This is when goods or services become so mainstream or ubiquitous that they are no longer distinguishable in the eyes of the marketplace or consumers.  For example, experts now believe smartphones have become commoditized.

Essentially, commoditization is about distinctive things becoming generic.  They are easy to spot when they plateau and then decline.  Examples are professional sports, conventions, shopping malls, touring Broadway and now NASCAR.

Unfortunately, none were willing to learn from the others.

This can even happen to local, chef-driven food cultures if and when visitors begin to find them anywhere.  It doesn’t mean that they won’t continue to be “satisfiers,” they just won’t be “motivators” for travel to a particular location.

The anecdote to commoditization, also referred to as commodification when it comes to destinations sustaining their appeal, is not to be preoccupied with going shopping for culture one day and bringing back one of everything that many other communities have.

The anecdote is to focus instead on nurturing and gardening the blend of indigenous attributes and facilities that make a community distinct.

Douglas Rushkoff, the author of such books as Present Shock, defines commoditization as more of a market problem for manufacturers of branded goods and commodification as more of a crime of the market against humanity.

Communities concerned about retaining sense of place must fear commodification and the “big game hunter” mentality that, claiming some special knowledge, relentlessly fosters it.

Consultants and studies are not the answer.

The reason communities continued to build more and more convention centers, stadiums and performing arts theaters even when it was clear that they would ultimately be doomed by over building is that they failed to factor in the simple law of supply and demand.

For example, in 2003 there were fewer than 200 communities across the country with theaters hosting touring Broadway shows.  While it is rarely, if ever, shown in feasibility studies, based on the last number I saw reported, there are now far than 600.

This is true, even though the percentage of Americans attending musical theater today is 20% lower than it was in 1982 and  even though attendance at touring Broadway shows has fallen lower than it was 20 years ago,

Even the total weeks the shows run each year is similar today to what it was in the 1980s.

This is disguised in feasibility reports by only showing ticket revenues or charts that show only a few years of historical perspective and never is it indexed to supply.

Nearly a decade ago, experts were quoted saying that touring Broadway was “intrinsically broken,” yet more and more communities continue to build more and more theaters, ignorant of the devastation suffered in the past when communities failed to respect supply and demand.

Many of my peers, expected to be experts in “demand-based’ economic development as economists define tourism, as well as guardians of sense of place are instead often enablers of facilities that don’t make sense.

Instead many lead the charge for “big game hunters” in their communities or become one themselves, merely firing any consultant who wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear until they found one that would.

I watched as this happened in many communities over my career and was steamrolled myself more than once for standing up to “big game hunters.”

A corollary to commodification is that once it passes over into generica, a community can never cross back in hopes of somehow restoring its sense of place.

Many communities are fighting back against powerful lobbies for commodification and blandification.

San Francisco struggles to cap the number of mainstream outlets, and others are considering capping the rates charged for commercial spaces to protect locally owned stores.

Voters in Malibu, California approved a measure limiting chain stores.  New Yorkers are banding together to save the city’s remaining 200,000 locally owned stores.

Communities could learn a lesson about commodification by studying the lodging industry which after spending billions making hotels indescript is now spending billions trying to make new properties seem “boutique-ish” and as though they belong in the communities responsible for drawing their guests.

Others, such as 21C which will soon open its third art museum/hotel in Durham by adaptively reusing old historic buildings, in this case the historic home of the former Central Carolina Bank.  The equally distinct Durham Hotel will soon open across the street.

Hotels such as these and the Aloft, soon to open in Durham’s American Tobacco District, are sure to open chef-driven restaurants, often tapping into Durham’s local colony of chefs.

But even here, policy makers fail to question developers or learn the lesson that “commodification is a crime of the market against humanity.”