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O P I N I O N
Bringing back civility There’s plenty of conflict and anger in the world, but rather than giving in, dive into the hard yet rewarding work of good-faith collaboration.
R eading The Wall Street Journal one morning, I became convinced that civility had disappeared from our planet. We’ve got angry and abrasive politicians (think Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders). And there’s brutality, with ISIS rounding up 5,000 civilians in Fallujah to use as human shields against attacks from the Sunnis and Shiites. There’s the strangling of business, particularly small companies, with over-regulation. The Dodd/Frank bill, for example, brought us 22,200 new pages of regulations, adding $35 billion in compliance costs annually. JP Morgan alone had to hire 19,000 new compliance officers.
Ed Friedrichs
After a year, Illinois, a state that’s underfunded by $7 billion, is still in a standoff over the state budget as fighting continues between the governor, who wants reform in state employee pensions, and the legislature, which is beholden to the public employee unions. Instead of reform, “I believe it’s possible for us as design and engineering professionals to effect change in our relationship with the teams with which we’re working.”
the legislature wants to raise taxes on millionaires, motorists, sodas, and real estate. And that was just in the morning! While these are extreme and disparate examples, I began to wonder if incivility is contagious and if we can bring true civility back into our daily lives and dealings. I hear more and more stories about scrapping among participants in projects – city staff and elected officials treating developers and architects as adversaries; contractors looking for ways to trip up architects and engineers.
See ED FRIEDRICHS, page 10
THE ZWEIG LETTER July 11, 2016, ISSUE 1159
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