Critical conversation
July 20, 2011
Part I – Life is a meandering journey punctuated by critical conversation.
In December 1983, I spent a wonderful evening enjoying the hospitality of a family in Moscow. The table was laid out with a spread clearly beyond the means of this family. Cold cuts, cheeses, caviar, champagne, and of course, vodka.
Our host, Misha, spoke a broken English but made great efforts to include me in the conversation and to make me feel welcome. Dinner was interrupted several times as he reached for his guitar and introduced the next song. “Kevin, this is a song about life. This is a song about love. This is a song about… a woman!” His two young daughters continued to gobble down the table treats with eyes a’bulging, and I sat patiently as he sung for me in a language I still don’t much understand. Our meal was thus interrupted several more times, each new song introduced in the same fashion. Life, love… and a woman! I guess some things are the same the world over.
After dinner, his daughters entertained us with dance, acrobatics, singing, and the piano. Conversation was not small talk, as we so often experience on this side of the pond. The fate of the world was held in the balance as we spoke at depth on major issues of the day. A more expressive experience you won’t find.
I can say without hesitation that the attention we received that evening has remained unmatched by any of my experiences since. I was truly touched. Perhaps more so because, to that point, my picture of the Russian people had been framed by the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series. I remember well that, after the Canadians scored a goal, mayhem ensued both on and off the ice, but when the Russians scored, they seemed to just turn around and skate back to centre for the next faceoff. To me, they were the ‘icemen’, an emotionless, rather inexpressive sort. Little did I understand. That crew, the Red Army team, was highly disciplined and trained to work like a machine. Moreover, the risk of being relegated to some isolated salt mine in Siberia with a series loss must have weighed heavily on them.
In any event, I mistakenly projected that faulty impression on to the Russian people as a whole. So young… so much to learn. Having married two Russians, I can tell you now that there is nothing at all inexpressive about this people.
Late into the night, Misha escorted us downstairs to hail a cab. It was a bitterly cold night, one of those times when you can feel and hear the snow crunching beneath your feet. Yet, he lingered while we waited for a taxi to discover us, and we continued our conversation. A bridge engineer by trade, this man, whom I had never met before, embraced me warmly and with his hands on my shoulders, his final words were (and I’ll never forget this), “Kevin, tonight, we have built a bridge. I wish in my heart of hearts for the leaders of the East and the leaders of the West to have such opportunity.”
What more is there to say than that? Break bread with a man and he is no longer a faceless enemy, hidden behind a mask.
To this day, I consider my evening with Misha and his family to have been one of those critical conversations in my meandering journey. Critical, in that it has prompted me to engage people. To listen better… and importantly, to hear… with a hope to understand.
Part II – “Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?”
From George Bernard Shaw, “The biggest problem in communications is the illusion that it has taken place.” Too often, we listen from our own ready-made framework of what is and should be, and as a result, miss what is being said. We hear what we want to hear.
As a case in point, I offer up the online discussion forum for Southern Arc Minerals, hosted by Stockhouse.com. Perhaps mistakenly, I’ve always been of the impression that the purpose of this forum is to engage other people in intelligent conversation on the topic of Southern Arc Minerals. Once upon a long time ago, the forum did serve as an excellent meeting place for investors looking for information, insights, and leads to new sources for better understanding of this investment. This is no longer the case. One of the obstacles to success on this account has been the anonymous format of the online discussion forum. It’s so easy to forget that there’s another human being on the other side of the conversation, and way too easy to toss barbs when one might otherwise have been restrained.
This mask of anonymity has never served intelligent discourse, in my view.
From the point of my introduction to this forum, I’ve never hesitated to identify myself, and to invite off-board communication. The result of this has been: the establishment of countless new relationships, friendships not otherwise available to me; this website; and a wealth of new information, insights, and leads. The result has also been a flood of new ‘critical conversations’ not otherwise available to me. This would include a phone call from Bob Moriarty of www.321gold.com in August 2007. Say what you will of the man, that call introduced me to Southern Arc president, John Proust, and for that, he has my sincere thanks. I can’t count the number of critical conversations that have followed that introduction.
I’ve had off-board connection with more than 100 people invested in Southern Arc, and have met more than 60 of these people face-to-face. I’ve had the pleasure of introducing many of these people to other investors, resulting in a veritable community of Southern Arc shareholders. I’m serious when I call this a community. I suspect that what this Company enjoys in community is unlike any other ever experienced by a publicly held company.
Bob Bishop once described it to me as a borderline cult. That may once have been the case, but it is no more. Instead, it has devolved into a schizophrenic morass of mental masturbation. One person, adopting multiple aliases, has declared himself Jesus, Buddha, and Krishna (curious that he hasn’t included Allah in the list), and won’t let go. Every time someone tells him to shut up once and for all, he responds as if they’re telling him a joke, answering, ‘that’s a good one!’ In other words, the forum is stricken with a village idiot. He loves the attention and can’t get enough. The Osmond Brothers claimed that one bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole darn bunch. Unfortunately, in some cases, that’s just not true. Conversation among posters hiding behind the mask of anonymity is already fragile enough without babbling nonsense coming into the picture. If you’ve ever been in a crowded swimming pool when somebody tossed in their young child without a diaper, you know what I mean. Everybody out!
The conversation has continued, mind you… just not on that forum, and much diminished in the number of participants. What once was a collection of more than 300+ posters and lurkers has fragmented into disparate small groups of off-board investors, discussing the Southern Arc investment among themselves, but to no benefit of the many now lost in a barren purgatory.
The people who have made the greatest contributions to this conversation are mostly self-employed, self-made, detail-oriented, engaged, and engaging. Witnessing the devolution of the forum, however, these people quietly made their way to the exit. Simply put, this is just history repeating itself one more time. Quality attracts quality, and the best will always step off to the sidelines to engage one another and to win on their own. Having already established off-board relationships with other like-minded investors, they merely re-situated themselves for continued productive conversation, absent the deranged divinity.
Innumerable attempts to reason with the village idiot have failed miserably. Either he cannot understand or just doesn’t care. Whatever the case, he cannot be reached.
I can’t speak for women, but think it’s true that men don’t acquire more intelligence with age. What you’re given is what you’ve got. One can only hope that as testosterone levels subside, what little intelligence we do possess is allowed to play a more active role. Hope, unfortunately, is not a strategy, and most of us have neither the time to waste, nor the inclination to muddle.
Part III – “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.”
… or maybe I need to grab a stick of bread and book a flight to Wisconsin. Or maybe a rolling pin… oh… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3FnpaWQJO0
Foolishly yours,
Kevin Graham