Raise the Hammer

“What we need is a catalyst. But as Solnit points out, these can usually only be seen in hindsight.”

A good read, but you nail it here. Pundits love to pinpoint these game-changing moments but it’s mostly a fatuous intellectual exercise. If you doubt this at all, I would invite you to trawl the library’s Spectator archives. You’ll find enough “Hamilton is turning the corner” stories to fill a coffee table book. And in some cases, they’ve prefaced coffee table books, as in 1971’s Pardon My Lunch Bucket:

http://www.raisethehammer.org/comment/49986

Part of the slipperiness is that “Hamiltonians” do not constitute a static population. There has been a steady and inexorable growth in transplants over the last decade, lured in by our well-publicized can’t-lose real estate bargains but eventually charmed by the city itself. Not coincidentally, that period coincides with the boutiquing of Locke South, James North and Ottawa North, as well as the growth of enlightened and artisanal wares in the Hamilton Farmer’s Market (if not in the explosion of neighbourhood farmers’ markets). Transplants, with their fresh eyes and comparatively fat wallets, have been a key driver in the change engine. (There are inherent challenges to this arrangement, of course:http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/504913--we-can-t-afford-not-to-have-accessible-housing-conference.)

Even “Hamilton apathy” is not monolithic, but a slow-onset atrophy of will. As unblemished as the boosterism of today’s crop of go-getters is, if they were faced with a long enough change curve, they might begin to tire and grouse. Imagine, for example, being time-warped back 20 or 30 years to an era marked by economic doldrums, monolithic media, calcified political conservatism and the absence of most grassroots electronic tools for networking/advocacy/organizing. That's not to deride optimists or to apologize for the acidic negativism that can well up in foruims like the Spec's online comments. It's merely to reiterate Gladwell's point (in Tipping Point follow-up Outliers) that successes rise on a tide of advantages and experiential momentum, and that timing is everything. That’s as true of cities as it is of individuals.