LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Boom Superman called. He can’t make it. He sends his regards. Something about a catastrophe. He was never coming, though. Right? What have we been waiting for, exactly? The silver bullet we’re now furiously—appropriately—opposed to? The lone investor who can’t afford absolutes? I’m afraid we’re too smart to believe in miracles anymore. The 1970s are over; the plants are closed. No more pouting. No more hoping. It’s time to be our own superheroes. We are. We are blue collars. We drip down into the dirt that raises our trees, that secure our foundations, that cake our feet in soil. Our houses are built and rebuilt on this sweat equity. Our ideas are cultivated from brainstorms so anxious they shred napkins. We have the will, if not always the way. A blue collar’s boom is better known as “results”: the redemptive consequences of working hard for something you’ve earned and deserve. That’s the boom that we know, the one that we can accept without skepticism. There’s a formula to that success. This is the real boom. Every day, another explosion. But it’s not all fireworks. Bombs go off that we don’t anticipate. There’s a lot of rage. Some booms we can’t avoid. Some booms we should listen to and answer, not just clean up, or worse, leave for the next guy. Some booms we don’t even notice until well after the fact. If only we had been paying attention.
When we approach our ups and downs with some scope of reason, we see what’s really big and what’s not so monumental. It makes us appreciate the triumphs that took months, years, decades to procure, that seemed against all reasonable logic, and it allows us to delight in the surprises that come out of nowhere. We won’t turn down a gift, and we promise to be thankful. It makes us sit up and pay attention to the emergencies that will certainly sneak up and shock us. Booms are good, even the bad ones. Fewer of them would be great, but we can’t avoid them. We need peaks and valleys. We also need sustenance, sustainability and solutions. We need to know that we can handle ourselves, with the composure of grateful adults, when big deals fall into our lap; and when a destructive bomb comes barreling toward us unforgivingly, that we can take a breath, have a moment, and get on with it. Let’s make “boom” a verb: something that we create for ourselves, and not that we wait for others to create onto us. Let’s give volume to the quiet, and silence the obnoxious. Let’s be smart and brave, and shake things up. I’d say you could ask Superman for advice, but he’s tied up at the moment, helping those who can’t help themselves. He sends his regards.
BCM 34 15