www.James-Strocel.com

I got the call Thursday that my SeedsBC funding was approved. As of today, I have stopped looking for work. I have a new job. For the next 40 weeks, I’ll be receiving funding and training to start a new web design business. For the next couple of weeks or so, I’ll be attending workshops on marketing, accounting, and business planning. After that, I’ll start calling up the sales leads I picked up during my application process and go on from there.

I feel like say something inspiring or Seth Godin-like about this, but it just doesn’t feel like the right time. This is not a product launch. It wasn’t even a tough decision to make. Freelance contracting made me money. Sending out resumes did not. I’m not exactly throwing off my chains and seizing the means of production. This is just the first, faltering step on a long journey.

Entrepreneurship, for the most part, is still something I’ve only read about in books. I have no doubt a lot of its details are obscured by the triumphalism and tragedy that makes for good business publishing. But I can’t give in to the fear of the unknown. As of now, there is no boss I can beg for my job back. I signed a contract with my government that I would give this venture my full attention. I have a mortgage and car insurance that can’t be paid with anything less than profit. It sounds like pressure, but to me it’s comforting. We spend our whole lives looking for direction, wondering where to put our energies. The only direction I have now is forward.

A common complaint about living in Abbotsford is that there are no good bookstores. We have four, but your choice is Coles in Seven Oaks, Hemingway’s used bookstore, the House of James Christian bookstore, and Food for Thought if crystals and tarot cards are your thing.

Sure, it’s an eclectic selection, but we’re a city of over 125,000 people. We deserve some kind of ostentatious literary presence in our town. I watch every big box development with baited breath. Maybe the shell of Linens & Things will be resurrected as a Chapters. Perhaps that giant red thing will be- aw, it’s just a Shopper’s Drugmart. It’s like we’re the town that doesn’t like to read.

To make matters worse, I think we’ve just passed the point where big box bookstores are profitable. Most of the books I buy are marketed and purchased entirely online. I see an interview or a video from the author and I just sashay down to the Chapters website where everything is (almost) always in stock and cheaper than the brick and mortar store.

Is the idle pleasure of browsing a bookstore doomed to antiquity?

Having an actual physical store is different enough from online retail that we should have them well into the future. The question is how to monetize real life stores. I think we’ll see something akin to the hyper-competitive retail market I saw in Tokyo. Every store had to compete with hundreds just like it in the area. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to try and get customers to spend time shopping. There were streetside barkers, brightly coloured (and colourfully written) deal signs, animated displays, and don’t get me started with the cross-promotion! Who would have thought of using a maid cafe to market transformable cell-phone robot toys? Whatever form brick and mortar retail takes, the common factor is going to be the passion of the salespeople. As much as I hate using that word, if you are going to sling books like a machine, you might as well get replaced by one.

I was tooling around on wikipedia the other day and found the page for the definition of elitism. On the right hand side was elitism in all its forms, classism, racism, even terms like heightism and mentalism. With all these ways for us to be more sensitive about people, I wonder if we’ll get to the point where no one has to feel bad about themselves, ever. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Now, I trust all of you, so I’m hoping you can help me weigh in on this.

About once a week I see a thread on Fark.com like this one about a news story concerning youth unemployment, debt, or other factors in a failure to launch. Each and every one of these threads devolves into a raging flame war between people who believe young people aren’t working hard enough and twenty-something college grads who can’t get jobs.

I wonder why some people get so angry when college grads expect to get better jobs using degrees they paid thousands of dollars for. Why shouldn’t they? The government expects them to. Billions in student loans go out to colleges and universities every year with the expectation that they produce graduates that make enough money to pay those loans back. The US is facing another debt crisis because they can’t collect on these education investments.

Moreover, it’s not like getting a degree just involves smoking weed and arguing about Sartre. Students spend hundreds of hours doing research and writing papers in order to graduate. In essence, they paid for the opportunity to work hard at something. Does that not mean anything in today’s economy? Even if someone is over-qualified for a position, isn’t a degree a written guarantee that a person can get up in the morning and follow through with their degrees?

Probably not, given that there are millions of people out there with these degrees. It’s almost as if an important human element is now missing from the hiring process. We’ve put so much stock in degrees and certificates, but all we’ve done is create a soulless buyer’s market. Where is the future of industry going to come from if we don’t create a path for new workers?

At first I was ambivalent about the HST. I didn’t know exactly what it was other than a combination of the GST and PST. I bought my house before the summer to avoid it. I thought the HST petition would be “fun”, that it would be nice to get a break from the Liberal party’s hegemony. There is something about taxes that inspires populist revolt. We feel the Boston tea party and the fall of the Bastille in our hearts whenever a politician dares to intimate that the government be somehow paid for the services it provides.It’s beginning to look like the HST petition was more of a referendum against our one-party legislature and Bill Vander Zalm’s return to politics than it was about helping the economy and making sure we had jobs.

This is not to say that the government is blameless. They completely botched the media coverage. They thought they could tack on an extra 7% to many goods and services without anyone noticing, when they should have been up front about the benefits from the start. Now, I’m not a tax lawyer, but from the research I’ve been able to gather, we need the HST for at least three reasons:

1) To reduce the cost of doing business in BC.

Under the PST system, BC businesses had to pay taxes on every input to their business. This includes heat, electricity, machinery, and computers. The HST eliminates these taxes and only needs to be paid on the end consumer product. This means more money for businesses so they can grow and invest in such grand things as HUMAN capital, which means better jobs for you and I. Even if you don’t have a job at this point, you could start your own business and have less costs to worry about.

2) To simplify the tax code for businesses.

Bringing in the HST and eliminating the PST takes out an entire level of bureaucracy for businesses. This frees up time and money they can use on other aspects of their services.

3) To keep tax revenue flowing from a rapidly aging population.

Like it or not, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a massive income tax revenue gap. An increased sales tax is a good way to make up the shortfall without increasing the burden on young people.

We should have known that, but they never bothered to tell us. Why should they, given how we reacted when we found out we’d be paying an extra quarter on our egg mcmuffins? The problem is that all political parties see themselves as immutable, flawless institutions, not a bunch of human beings in suits trying to make decisions.

If the HST does what it’s supposed to do and we all have more income because of it, who cares if we pay a little more sales tax? I think to complain about it gives the government a little too much credit. It’s up to us to make real changes in government. The HST is but one idea to make the province a better place and keep our government from spending money it doesn’t have. If we don’t have a better idea to take its place, all this petition is doing is tying up our supreme court and generating a little schadenfreude for bitter Liberal opponents who couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less form a government.

I read the story of dino town closing down in the Vancouver Sun yesterday. Really poignant stuff. The park had survived Time Warner pulling the Flintstones license out from under them in 1994. The original owners are now retired. Their son took over the park, but developed a benign brain tumor. Though he recovered,  he sold out to a land developer so they could put an RV park in there.

I know this is how business works. The RV deal was the best the owner could ever have hoped for. My generation just seemed…so small when I read that column. The park was built for Baby Boomers and their kids. Now that the next generation has families of their own to entertain and share memories with- poof, no more theme park. The retirees need somewhere to empty their septic tanks now.

There’s a lesson here for us though. There are times when it seems like we’ll never top the Baby Boomers, let alone the Silent or Greatest Generation before it that fought WWII. We are taught that the frontier is over, that best we can ever do is to maintain the institutions that our parents built for us.

There may come a day when someone else builds a place like DinoTown, using intellectual property that’s owned by its creators and cannot be usurped by faceless Multi-nationals. (Time Warner itself is losing money hand over fist, proving that things like Multi-national corporations are a bad idea anyway.) Somehow, this is a clean break. It’s a reminder that our world is mortal, maintained by the constant care of people who love it and want to make it a better place. If we want places for our kids to play, good restaurants to eat at, and beautiful towns to walk in, we must look to ourselves to make all of that possible.

I wonder if Axe Cop is what Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood had in mind when they talk about creative play for children. If you haven’t read Axe Cop yet, go there now to right this injustice. I’ll wait. See, he’s a cop and he’s got an Axe, and he partners up with all these superheroes to fight the likes of Dr. Stinkyhead, King Evilfatsozon, and Vampire Man Baby Kid. The kicker is that it all comes from the head of a 5-year-old Malachai Nicolle and drawn by his 29-year old-brother Ethan.

This comic is just pure fun. Axe Cop runs into wish-granting unicorn-babies, robot zombie worlds, and rides a rocket-powered dinosaur dragon named Wexter (who has guns for arms). Best of all, he defeats bad guys with his axe. Although this is all springing from the mind of a small child, parents groups would be outraged if something like this ever made it to television. The main character is literally an axe-wielding maniac. He uses violence to solve his problems, not words.  His all-birthday cake diet sets a terrible example of healthy eating habits. Worst of all, he only has one girl on his team. Talk about gender stereotyping!

As long as I could remember, adults were always trying to impose their insecurities on kids’ playtime. I can distinctly remember as an eight year old finding out what the words “violence” and “influence” meant from a TV Guide column. GI Joe, Transformers and Robotech were supposed to influence me to commit violent acts. Even as a kid I could tell this was pure garbage. It’s a children’s cartoon, not mind control! In fact, I remember many episodes warning against the dangers of mind control.

The problem is we don’t recognize childhood for what it is. We’ve got this idea that childhood is an idyllic paradise free of problems where everyone plays nice and no one calls anyone names. Malachai is a nice, normal 5-year-old boy who did what any 5-year-old boy would do when presented with the opportunity of infinite possibility. He took the most extreme elements he could find in his world and mashed them up into a story that’s entertaining for him and everyone else on the internet. If we really want children grow up to be more creative and think for themselves, we need less social engineering and more Axe Cop!

That phrase was a mantra to me growing up. It was trumpeted by every third children’s book, my school’s curriculum, and even a few He-man and GI Joe PSAs. I understand now that it was an subtle attempt by all these institutions to instill ideas of racial and sexual equality into my fragile little mind. For the most part, it worked. We don’t judge people or things by their appearance today. Unfortunately, we’ve gone so far as to think that appearance doesn’t matter at all.

You might say this is our society evolving. I say it’s willful ignorance. Why? Appearances are a part of our decision making process. You wouldn’t trust a personal trainer with a beer gut, and you wouldn’t step into a house that was swaying in the wind. How can we critically think if we don’t account for information we take in through our own eyes?

This goes beyond using appearances to keep our personal safety. The forces of aesthetics influence our culture to this very day. If we pretend they don’t exist, we can’t understand how our society works and we’ll ultimately lose control of our culture entirely.

Whether we liked it or not, the Tamil refugee ship docked in Victoria, and  the 490 passengers made it safely into the hands of the BC correctional system. Handling that many people at once isn’t such a problem for our border and immigration services. They see about 30,000 refugee claimants a year. It still made a lot of people think good and hard about how (and if) our immigration system works.

It’s clear that there are people-smugglers are involved in this, but I don’t believe that the Tamil refugees had many options other than that tramp freighter. While I haven’t met anyone trying to immigrate to Canada, my friend Tarra had to go through the US system to be with her husband in Seattle. It was expensive and a bureaucratic pain in the ass, but I imagine it was preferable to spending three months in a crowded ship with a suspect toilet. Sri Lanka doesn’t exactly have the best human rights record, and these are members of an ethnic group that just lost a major civil war. When the Tamils in Toronto speak to the media, they often hide their faces so that their relatives back home won’t get harassed by the authorities. It doesn’t sound like they could just go to the Canadian consulate in downtown Colombo and start the immigration process.

I think the government is doing exactly what it needs to do: investigate the refugees on a case by case basis, and prosecute any snakeheads or terrorists that they find. Liberal MP Keith Martin suggested that we set up refugee camps abroad so that we can undercut the people smugglers and put them out of business. Personally, I don’t think you should need more than a clean criminal record and an A on your TOEFL to get into this country.  We have so much room. Canada’s so depopulated it’s like we’re doing a dress rehearsal for the rapture or something. Immigrants also create jobs by using government and commercial services. Our sales taxes ensure that they provide revenue for the rest of us. Taking refugees also undermines repressive regimes that we don’t like, but don’t have the money to topple militarily. It’s easy to get angry when we see the government devoting time and money to people who aren’t citizens, but if we’re committed to human rights and democracy, I can think of no better way to put our money where our mouth is.