As a kid, I didn’t always sleep much at night. Dad would come and tuck me in and switch the lights off at bedtime. I would ask him to leave the light in the hall on.
It wasn’t that I feared monsters would invade the space under my bed in the dark. (They would have been buried alive in cutouts from sports magazines and succumbed to a diet of dust bunnies.)
I needed the dim ray of light to find the dial on my transistor radio without knocking it off the nightstand.
In those days, long before someone put a start pistol beside my head and fired it, my hearing was good. I could keep the volume below level one and listen to the radio for hours without waking my siblings or, worse, my parents.
The old hometown only had two radio stations and they both only played top 40 hits; one leaned a little country, and the other leaned toward rock. Fortunately, after sundown, I could pick up big US am stations. I was, therefore, one of the only people in town that knew what talk radio was.
KGO San Francisco was one of my favourites. In addition to the interesting discussions callers had after midnight, they broadcast the Golden State Warriors basketball games. Any team with Golden in their name was cool and, before I was ten, I was addicted to keeping track of Rick Barry’s free throw percentage.
One dark night, as I slowly twisted the dial to find familiar voices between the scratchy sounds of stations too far away, I came across something different. They spoke English, but with some kind of almost robot-like accent. The night I first heard them, I was intrigued by a story about a small village that had almost been wiped out after severe snowstorms had isolated them from the rest of the country for a prolonged period. When rescuers finally reached them, people were starving. Some had died because they couldn’t get medicine. The only commodity the village had enough of was vodka. The reporter told incredible stories of survival. He asked a villager how they had managed to keep such a large stock of vodka throughout their isolation. The villager spoke in a language I’d never heard. A translator continued...
“We had convoys. They brought vodka from a neighbouring town.”
The reporter asked why the convoys didn’t bring food or medicine.
“We didn’t think of that.”
Basketball season was probably over or hadn’t started yet, and I found the stories more interesting than the complaint-prone know-it-alls on KGO. The new station became a favourite.
It was almost like they were broadcasting from a different planet. On the news they spoke of war, but it seemed to be a different war than the one in Vietnam that took up most of the evening news hour on the few TV channels we had access to.
Slowly but surely, it dawned on me.
It was the same war we watched on the news, but in the version on my new favourite radio station, we were the enemy. It was weird and a bit deflating, but to a ten-year-old, it was interesting. More interesting than KGO and better than sleeping.
In school, we had a class called social studies. One morning, one of the topics was “current events” and one of the current events was the Vietnam war and how our neighbours to the South were fighting to free the Vietnamese people from the claws of communism.
I put my hand up and innocently asked a question, blissfully unaware of the chaos that would ensue.
“What if we’re the bad guys?”
The teacher was shocked.
My classmates were shocked.
It wasn’t because I said “we”, either. Just like a hockey fan in the nosebleed seats goes to the bar after a game and tells his buddy “we won” as if they were on the ice, we Canadians were on the American side, even though we weren’t physically fighting the war.
The school intercom didn’t broadcast an alarm saying,
“Attention all personnel. Attention all personnel. Communist in grade four social studies. Communist in grade four social studies!”
but I did have to take the walk of shame to the principal’s office and answer some questions about geopolitics. When I told him, only half truthfully, that we religiously watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite to get our world facts in order, he believed that my in-class question had been an innocent, albeit ill-informed, one.
I was back in class by lunchtime.
I learned a lesson that day, even though it likely wasn’t the one the principal hoped I had learned.
Thirty-some years later, the hotel company I worked for was rapidly expanding.
Emerging markets, and African countries, in particular, were a priority. We made a bold statement predicting that we would have a hotel in every capital city in Africa.
The ten-year-old inside me wanted to raise his hand. Raised hands go unnoticed in office towers, so I wrote a memo and sent it to our senior management team.
I told the story of listening to Radio Moscow as an innocent, ignorant, blissfully unaware child and then I continued,
“What if we’re the bad guys?”
I went on to ask if the purpose of our expansion plan was to help emerging markets emerge, or if the people that lived in the cities we “targeted” would perceive us as bad guys; exploiting lower labour costs to enjoy the larger profit margins emerging market hotels had.
The next morning, the CEO was in my office shortly after 7:00 a.m. When he stuck his arm out, I half-expected to see a termination letter in his palm but it was open and empty. When I shook his outstretched hand, he said:
“You’re the only person that can write something like that and get away with it.”
He admitted that they hadn’t asked themselves the question of how they wanted to be perceived in the emerging market cities themselves.
“We should have. Thanks for reminding us.”
In the years between my trip to the principal’s office and the memo, I asked myself that question many times. I still ask it today.
Everything we do has an impact beyond ourselves.
How we behave will determine what that impact is.
It will also determine if we’re “good guys” or “bad guys”.
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