As it looks to be the best coffee place in my new and temporary hood in Amsterdam, I am sitting in De Koffie Broeder. Broeder is fairly new to the Czar Peterstraat, a street I know pretty well from previous adventures. The city’s best cheese shop is next door, there is eascy access to three parks, trams to take you wherever you need to go and and a great cafe at the end of the block. You would not kick this street out of the pantheon of great places to live anywhere in the world, even though it might not crack the top ten in this city.
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About paradise . . . that South Africa could be it is what Mr. Dash and I said to one another for the few months I was there.
Incredible landscape. Natural resources to spare. Things grow well in the ground (including grapes that make great wine). Resilient people and perfect weather . . . paradise, or should be.
The only things getting in the way—causing the power outages and the infrastructure decay and the anger among the common folk—are difficult history and pervasive corruption and selfish leadership . . . the belief that systems shall inevitably serve the few. Sound familiar?
Intractable problems and indecipherable complexity and impossibly vested interest keep paradise at bay in lots of places but it will help to start by swallowing the pill of simple and obvious: progressive taxes, bolster the middle class, more bikes, fewer walls.
Even if a lot of happy accidents have made helping Amsterdam a success, the Netherlands actually works to take care of its people. And that goes a long way.
Still, as South Africa remains a sterling example of how but a hundred years of desperate resistance can undo an increadibly stupid mode of governance, you have to wonder how long it might take us to cut through the current spate of nationalism, wealth consolidation, and tech-driven affrontery we suffer from today. What if we went about fixing things for the average person rather than obsessing about, say, who uses which bathroom?
If paradise is engagement, the road to hell is paved with distraction.
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The coffee at Broeder is not quite as good as at White Label or Black Gold. Nor is the music as well curated. But now, on a Sunday morning, Lou Reed is playing:
You do what you gotta do
You do everything you can
Where might we get if we did what we had to do?