Genteel

Intellectual, idealistic, prudent, proper: so Boston presents itself. Looking out my classroom window at the rainswept City Hall plaza, you seem eminently respectable, the busy people rush by under their umbrellas on their way to their way back to their desks.

I've been reading, listening actually, to the exploits of pirates and privateers like Henry Morgan operating in the Caribbean in the late 17th C. From the taking of Jamaica, through the sacking of town and cities on the Spanish Main, to the drowning of the town of Port Royal, the story of these buccaneers is remarkable--and there's a Boston connection.

Who bought and resold the loot taken from Spanish Porto Bello or Maracaibo?  Boston merchants. Later when sugar rather than stolen  property was at the heart of the Jamaican economy, Boston merchants used it to make rum to fuel the Triangle trade that brought slaves from Africa to the New World. Indeed, later still,  when the engine of industrial development was cotton production, Boston led the way in investing in the plantation system of the South.

Your Revolutionary lawlessness has been white-washed as patriotism. The intolerance exhibited in the banishment of Anne Hutchison has been atoned for by a statue in front of the State House. And you've had your explicit criminals, the Ponzi's the Bulgers. But the pilings hammered into harbor or tidal mud to build out the North End or fill in the Back Bay were financed by the proceeds of morally questionable (to say the least) enterprises. And butter wouldn't melt in your mouth!

Trading cities make their money where they can. I think of Tyre and Sidon, the Hansa towns, Amsterdam, all making their living bringing in cheap, transforming, and send out at a profit. One cargo outward bound and another inward, with several in between, a profit at each step. So much of the history of commerce is of exploitation of one resources or another, natural or human. So why should your hands be clean, St Botolph's town?

But we're all beneficiaries of the past, checkered as it is. The idea was that succeeding generations, over time, could be progressively de-sullied, as if, at any age we don't have our own deeds to answer for, and include myself.

But there you are out my window, being nor'eastered. Everything is battened down or else beaten down by the pelting rain. Yet the work of the city goes on. The opportunism of the past has lead to the opportunities of the present, which you're busy taking advantage of. The raw will to live, to thrive, and in your case, to be something special, persists, as it should.