Radically Rethinking Resettlement: A Syria Solution?

The Status Quo

So, we've all been talking about the Syrian refugee situation for a while now. Four million people have fled Syria, escaping a war zone of mayhem, chaos, and death, and now as America, land of immigrants and second chances, we are faced with the question: what are we going to do about it?

One side says it is our moral imperative to render aid and provide shelter. The other says that due to security concerns, we should stand back and do nothing. So, we've settled into our trenches: “Help, because that's the right thing to do,” vs. “Don't help, because that's the safe thing to do.” It gives us clear teams in which to band together and rage at the other side.

I don’t have a huge amount of patience left for this debate. The people who’ve entrenched their position in fearmongering, xenophobia, and a false choice between compassion and security aren’t really interested in hearing the opposition (to be fair, I’m also not really going to sit down and read exactly why each of those 31 US state governors claim they won’t accept refugees, since it mostly boils down to being terrified of ISIS and/or pandering to their terrified-of-ISIS base).

As you can probably tell, philosophically I'm on the side of taking in more refugees. But even on this side, I don't feel like I see anyone talking about how specifically we can help. I mean, there's the usual micro/individual level of donating money or writing your elected representatives to urge action. But what about the macro level, the governmental policy side of it? Well, Obama's administration has committed to increasing our intake of Syrian refugees to 10,000 over the next year, which is great as far as it goes, but again, this is a 4,000,000-strong problem, so that’s only addressing it by a quarter of one percent.

Imagination

So, let's do a thought experiment. For just a moment, I want you to put aside the questions of resources, political will, controversy, and start simply from one overarching question: what would it take to make a massive, real impact on this crisis that the world is facing?

Let's start the bidding with a nice round number–what if America took in one MILLION refugees? And in what ways might that be not a massive burden or hardship for America, but rather an opportunity? Think about it. Every massive wave of immigration in US history has been ultimately beneficial. Taking in immigrants is what we were made to do as a country, and the crazy thing is that give it a generation or two, and suddenly these others, these foreigners, these immigrants just become… Americans.

(For a very recent pop culture lens on this, you can watch the Netflix show Master of None by Aziz Ansari, which in addition to being interesting and funny, depicts several first-generation Americans’ stories and those of their immigrant parents.)

Policy Model

The dominant policy model of refugee resettlement in America is that which was employed following the evacuation of Vietnam. It is a paradigm of assimilation, distributing the incoming refugees as broadly as possible across major metropolitan centers in order to minimize as much as possible their impact upon arrival, and by pretty much all accounts it was very successful:

In 1975, in the closing days of the Vietnam War, about 130,000 Vietnamese who were generally high-skilled and well-educated, and who feared reprisals for their close ties to Americans, were airlifted by the United States government to bases in the Philippines, Wake Island, and Guam. They were later transferred to refugee centers in California, Arkansas, Florida, and Pennsylvania for up to six months of education and cultural training to facilitate their assimilation into their new society. Although initially not welcomed by Americans (only 36 percent in a national poll favored Vietnamese immigration), President Gerald Ford signed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975, which granted the refugees special status to enter the country and established a domestic resettlement program.  

“From Refugees To Americans: Thirty Years Of Vietnamese Immigration To The United States” by Alicia Campi of the Immigration Policy Center 

This seems to be the approach currently being discussed for the 10,000 Syrians we’ve committed to accepting, and it makes sense for the most part, as there are strong parallels in the situations. I’m not sure how many Americans know it, but–much like those 130,000 Vietnamese–the Syrian refugees are generally well-educated and skilled workers. Many of the adults have professional degrees, and the young hold aspirations of attending universities–they’re more like us than they’re not.

For instance, I’ve heard idiotic newscasters point to the fact that some refugees have smartphones as somehow “evidence” that they aren’t really so badly off, but it just goes to show how like us they are. If a bloody civil war broke out in your backyard and you had to run for your life, would any one of you leave your smartphone at home? No, you’d take it and use every social media and tech tool available to help survive (Syrian refugees use GPS to navigate unfamiliar countries, Facebook groups to coordinate and share tips, and generally behave as, you know, people in the 21st century would in their situation).

So, problem solved, right? Draft a new 1975-style Migration and Refugee Act and all’s good? Well, maybe, but remember, we’re aiming at one million, not one hundred thousand. I don’t know how well the “spread them out as far as possible” strategy would work with ten times as many. It’s certainly worth considering! But let’s let our creativity roam a little more first.

AN ALTERNATIVE 

So for the sake of argument, let’s think about what the opposite of the 1975 plan would be. Instead of trying to limit the burden by spreading out the incoming refugees among our existing infrastructure, what if we built new infrastructure to accommodate them? I’m not talking about makeshift tent cities, but actual new cities, from scratch?

This is one of the biggest ways in which we have an actual opportunity in admitting refugees. I've read many essays lamenting the difficulty of working to improve old, established cities, and how much better things could be if able to start from a clean slate (re: the mind-boggling complexity of getting train arrival countdown clocks in the New York subway).

This type of project at the scale of an entire new city, however, inevitably runs into the issue of how to create and populate something so interdependent and connected all at once, since our model of urban development in America has so long been one of more or less organic growth over time. Our cities almost always started because there was a port, river, trade route, adjacent natural resource, or defensible geographic formation which we populated with a small number of settlers, gradually building out and expanding as generations multiplied and newcomers were drawn in.

Thus, the danger in building innovative new city models is that no one will move to them. No one wants to live in a city built for 10,000 when there’s only 50 people there, so no one moves in, and it can never reach the necessary tipping point of a self-sustaining population level. This, in fact, was the end result of many of China’s planned “eco-cities”.

But in this hypothetical US project (which we might as well name… let’s call it The Clean Slate Project), we have entire cities of refugees fleeing at once, and we could theoretically populate an entire city in a matter of weeks or months. Suddenly, innovators working on how to dramatically improve humanity’s future cities could be given a chance to explore a wide range of possibilities. Each refugee would be–in tech parlance–a beta tester of sorts for visionary new living structures.

We could gather the biggest experts in cities from across America and the world–architects, engineers, urban planners, city comptrollers, real estate developers, academics, etc. and (just throwing out numbers here) come up with 50-100 concepts for cities ranging from 10,000-50,000 people. I would be shocked if we couldn’t immediately get at least 30 radically different and innovative concepts, ones that have already been developed and fine-tuned for years, just waiting for a chance to be implemented. Exemplary PhD theses in urban design; planned communities by ambitious architects; “Best innovative city” contests. (I just googled “innovative city design contest” and found the "Future of Cities" issue of Wired which I can’t believe I hadn’t read yet and will have to peruse later.)

They would be opportunities to study and develop new public transit networks, alternative energy sources, construction materials, “smart city” technology, driverless cars, urban ecology, population dynamics, and much more.

But why, you may ask, should we help these Syrians when so many American citizens are living in their own dire circumstances: the rural poor, the urban homeless, citizens struggling to feed their families or get out from underwater on their mortgage? Well, there’s no reason the opportunities inherent in such a project have to be (or even should be) limited to refugees from Syria.

Citizens of all walks of life could apply to the Clean Slate Project–from those living on the edge of life and death each time the temperature drops below freezing, to those frustrated NYC millennials tired of paying 70% of their income on rent in a city with an insane housing shortage (ahem), to people generally doing fine but who maybe feel a restlessness with where they are and want a chance to change their life. These people could give us their qualifications, experience, and a sense of what work they’d ideally want to do, and we’ll see what we can do with those building blocks in terms of making cities that work.

It’s not just NYC, by the way, facing an urban housing cost crunch. And as for the homeless populations? Yes, a significant element of the problem is the prevalence of untreated mental health disorders, but there’s a lot of people who could get back on their feet given a chance at permanent housing, as seen in the seminal Family Options Study results released recently by HUD.

And more broadly, what effects could this have on the nation? Well, consider that America just hit a significant tipping point, as decades of wage stagnation and ever-greater polarization of the country’s wealth concentration mean that the majority of Americans are no longer middle class. Let’s not forget that the modern American ascendant middle class was driven in no small part by the subsidized mass housing projects following WWII, and (minus the rampant discrimination and redlining that badly muddies the legacy of the Levittown era) a new iteration of such projects could have significant, long-lasting benefits for our economy going forward.

These are the most significant net positives that I can see–saving potentially millions of lives, all while providing people with incredible opportunities to build a better future. I can also imagine many, many other comparatively less dramatic results, such as the opportunity for a massive language exchange/immersion program to increase our Arabic-fluent population (an obvious asset in an age where many security concerns revolve around Middle Eastern relations), a potential development of “in-sourcing”, putting jobs we might otherwise send overseas back in America, where the pay stays in our economy and taxes go to our government (and Americans running call centers, for instance, don’t have to deal with the headaches of managing a workforce in a time zone 13 hours ahead). Those types of benefits feel almost petty relative to the more grandiose ones, but they’re worth weighing as well.

A still large, but less immediate upside is also a concern close to my heart–space colonization. No, seriously, if a far better strategy for deploying large, complex cities from scratch can be developed, it has important implications for humanity’s spread to the stars. The logistics of interplanetary travel followed by terraforming or building bubble cities will likely cause the “lone pioneer” colonization model–employed in European New World expansion or American West settlement–to be impractical, since a single family or small community has far less capacity to break out of Earth’s gravity than to pile into a sailing ship or covered wagon and set out.

THIS ALL SOUNDS GREAT IN THEORY, BUT WHAT ABOUT…

Ok, fine. we'll start letting real world concerns start impinging on our thought experiment.

FUNDING SOURCES

Well, there's the money problem of course, and I get the feeling that waving a hand and saying "the government has the capacity for truly astonishing deficit spending if necessary" isn't going to win many people over (even if it is generally true). So: funding.

Governmental Re-allocation:

First, and most obviously whenever government spending cuts are discussed–defense spending. We spend more on our military than the next 20 countries combined, 19 of whom are our allies. But I would contend that humanitarian support for these refugees IS defense spending. In a changing world, the source of our national security becomes less and less about how many aircraft carriers or fighter jets we can field, and more and more about soft power. Rather than being able to crush conventional opposition, we have to find a path towards preventing terrorist threats before they even develop. No, not by defining every Muslim man of “fighting age” as an enemy combatant and dispatching them via drone. But rather by eliminating the conditions in which anger, fear, and desperation breed radicalism by turning our resources towards humanitarian aid instead.

What a statement we could present to the world. We’d take the money we use to create weapons of death that will rain fire upon your homes and families (which by the way we literally call “Hellfire” missiles. Is it any wonder we're not exactly winning hearts and minds?), and instead we'll use those dollars to shelter you, spirit you away from the chaos, and give you a chance to start over afresh. I wonder which of those two approaches to Middle East diplomacy is more likely to foment resentment, anger, hatred, and violence towards the Western world (hint: it's the fire and death thing. You know, the thing that created the conditions for ISIS to be born in the first place?)

So there's a completely realpolitik, soft power-oriented, cynical, self-serving reason to take in the refugees. But it's also the right thing. How great, that the right thing and the smart thing and the effective thing might all be the same in this case? The thing it is perhaps not is the obvious thing or the easy thing. But then again, what was it that crazy, wild-eyed optimist once said about going to the moon? "We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." A modern moon-shot spirited grandiose initiative comes not from a childish naiveté, but rather a careful consideration of what is most admirable about our country’s history and trying to live up to and even improve it.

Private Funds

On the civilian side, of course we can open the floodgates for anyone to donate to this project who believes in it. We could set up a Kickstarter campaign, even, for each of the hundred new city proposals, and perhaps we should. But individual charitable giving and crowdfunding can only go so far.

Instead, what if we find ways to leverage some of our big financial guns? America is hungry for innovation. It always has been, and the appetite for disruption and optimization seems especially rabid in my generation–but a huge amount of that creativity and drive has been channeled into just the digital world of software, for the obvious reason that it is among the easiest fields to iterate quickly, replacing whole architectures in months or years, building brand new systems from scratch. On the other hand, things like apartment complexes, road design, urban planning, energy production, many of the fundamental and essential elements of our society have been developed so slowly, almost organically, over many years that one of the biggest impediments to overhaul is the presence of existing, already functional, "good enough" structures.

There exists today technology and knowledge at an advanced enough level to build many new systems from scratch easier, cheaper, and more effectively than do the patchwork upgrade procedures employed currently. This is true of MANY industries. Prototypes have been developed that could be major improvements, but they require large purchase commitments to make scaling them make sense, and the large scale customers who could make an order sufficiently large (cities, major corporations, etc) want something that's already been proven to work at scale.

So you wind up with a bunch of gunshy financial actors, each waiting for someone else to upgrade first. Everyone wants to be the third or fourth adopter, but never the first. (See the development of Google Fiber, where there was such skepticism, but once results were shown, cities started competing to get it and we forget anyone ever doubted it in the firstplace.) So, we find those ideas and give the R&D departments of the world the chance to dump their budgets into their dream scenario. We find a GE environmental engineer who wants to build a highly sustainable village of bio-fuel powered houses built out of sod and set deep into hillsides. A physicist working on thorium nuclear reactors which will ultimately have drastically safer waste, but have trouble getting traction because of the "not in my backyard" syndrome.

Projects like Google's Sidewalk Labs and Facebook's Gehry-designed company city show how these tech giants, aware of the potential for improvements (and with their usual attitude of “well, let’s just do it ourselves”) have begun investigating the benefits of more centrally planned and technologically integrated cities, so they could be included as entities in the process of some of these Clean Slate test cities. In exchange for that chance to test even more theories and iterations, they could be asked to lay out some of their massive cash reserves to help cover the costs.

Bonds?

This is a random thought, but what if we set up a way for Americans to “buy in” to the new cities, like they once did with war bonds to support the military? They’d be government-backed, and appreciate in some relationship with the cities as they developed to become economically more significant as engines of growth. This idea is extremely underdeveloped, but I’m curious what someone who knows more about bonds would think of it.

AMERICA CAN’T HANDLE THAT INFLUX, IT’S TOO MANY

A million is a lot of people, and it may feel like there’s no way America could possibly support that all of a sudden. But guys, seriously, America is HUGE. Our population density is 35 People per square km. We could accommodate a massive amount more people without even noticing if the structures are put in place to support it. We don't need to become some Coruscant-like city planet to achieve higher density, either. Hell, the UK's population density is 267 people per square km, and you can still get to picturesque little farm villages less than an hour outside London.

Or, consider that Jordan alone has taken in 600,000 refugees, despite having an economy about 0.1% the size of America’s, and being ¾ the size of Pennsylvania. And even more importantly, economies aren’t zero-sum games when discussing this type of project, as it provides a path for refugees to become economic actors, driving supply and demand and growing GDP just as population growth does. (I hate the phrase “productive members of society” because it’s often used in such a condescending and soulless way, but that's what we're talking about here.)

Incidentally, this would also function as an economic stimulus package. It’s work for a huge number of construction workers, manufacturers, and the sort of blue collar American jobs that politicians always go on and on about wanting to save. At the same time, it provides a really unique chance for experimentation and development in the idea and design economy that keeps America on the cutting edge of the world.

SECURITY

Here it is, the biggest stumbling block in gathering political will for taking in refugees. I’m not sure what I can say that hasn’t been said by others. I already talked earlier about how accepting these people can actually be a net positive for our long-term national security. ISIS wants us to be afraid of refugees so that we’ll reject them, making them desperate enough to turn to ISIS instead, in turn bolstering their numbers and political strength. The only way to defeat that strategy is with empathy and compassion, not walls and fear.

You don’t solve the problem of terrorism by killing terrorists. Humans only resort to such atrocities out of desperation. Present an alternative, a better world, and the vast majority will take it. Let’s go back to a World War II analogy for a second. The problem: an expansionistic, insanely violent political party (the Nazis, of course) were spreading throughout Europe, conquering and committing terrible genocide, while maintaining popular support through whipping up xenophobia and promising a better life for all. In sum, not as different from ISIS as we might think.

So, how did we solve that problem? Well, we eventually went to war, yes, but did we kill every single member of the Nazi party? Of course not. We stopped them militarily, but then (and this is the crucial part we often forget) we helped the country rebuild. The Marshall Plan invested significant amounts of money in rebuilding Western Europe, including Germany, because we were able to accept that the citizens themselves were not our enemies, the ideology and preachers of hate were. 60 years later, Germany is one of our closest and most economically powerful allies. We need to take a bit more of the long view on this one, everyone.

Then there’s a reorientation we may wish to consider when it comes to how we think about risk.  Let me put it this way: if we treated terrorism like we treat drunk driving, we would have far better luck stopping it. We have attacked the drunk driving issue on many fronts, but only one of them is more severe punishment for perpetrators. No, far more importantly, we actually changed the culture that gave rise to it. We taught people that it was reprehensible, that it was their duty to stop their friends from doing it, and we gave alternatives to the goal–namely, getting home after a night out. The designated driver, calling a cab, getting an Uber, these strategies have all massively and measurably reduced drunk driving. Remove the reason for a behavior, make it unacceptable, and give a better solution to the problem the behavior is responding to, and it will drastically decrease. This is basic psychology/behavioral economics.

Still, despite our successes, there are still drunks on the road, and we drive anyway. Every time you drive a car, you’re in danger. There are accidents every day. But it’s necessary to living our lives, so we do what we can to minimize the risk and get on with our lives. The same approach would cripple most terrorist strategy. Our fear, our overreaction is essential to the way they operate.

This is not giving up and accepting terrorism as the new normal, but rather a different intervention model, one with the goal of eliminating as much of the problem as possible and approaching it systematically, rather than with emotional, reactionary posturing and sweeping changes that seem impressive, but have less actual impact (so-called “security theater”).

So even if there are radicals who slip through the screening procedures we put in place (which are actually pretty rigorous, you know), giving them the chance to engage in this hopeful vision of a new future will be as much a blow to domestic terrorist action as never letting them in at all. I’ll also point out that, just as we’ve reached the cultural point of rejecting drunk driving (“Dude, Chad, you’re wasted, give me the damn keys,” proclaim responsible frat bros all over America), these new communities would be mostly made up of those who have fled halfway around the world to escape ISIS’s violence and brutality, so they’re going to be just about the most hostile breeding grounds for ISIS recruitment you could imagine.

ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES

Much has been made of the potential consequences of admitting more Syrian refugees, but what are the consequences should we turn our backs? Looking at the course of history, so many intelligent people have wound up being so wrong about so many moral issues, in ways that shock and horrify us today. How could anyone have ever thought slavery was an acceptable state of affairs? How could we have intentionally given smallpox-infected blankets as “gifts” to Native American populations? How could the US have refused to take in Jewish refugees during the Holocaust?

I’m not saying we should hate these historical Americans because we’re so morally advanced in comparison. I’m saying that while we can know we’re doing comparatively better than they were, we should be careful not to let that make us think human morality has nowhere to grow from here. I often think about one of my favorite quotes, from anthropologist Robert Ardrey.

We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. 

I like to go one step further, and think of us as not “risen” apes, but rather “rising” apes. We are not yet at the zenith of our moral arc.  I often find myself wondering– in 100 years, what will our great-grandchildren find horrifying about the world we live in today? Sadly, we can make some good guesses. The US prison-industrial complex, for one. Our continuing constellation of marginalization, violence, and discrimination against oppressed groups of various stripes. Probably also our failure to respond adequately to the threat of climate change.

But of all the issues we can look at past iterations of, the taking in of people in need seems like it’s particularly recurrent, and America historically always seems to respond with fear over compassion. Yet, as far as moral positions go, “help people in need” is pretty universal. The religion of every one of the US governors saying to keep out the refugees tells them to help others. “The Parable of the Good Samaritan” is explicitly about a foreigner helping someone beset by danger in their own land.

You know what, I’m really not a moral authority, nor am I even a Christian, so I may not exactly have standing to admonish people with scripture. Let’s see what, for instance, Martin Luther King, Jr. had to say about that parable, which he addressed in his famous "I Have Been to the Mountaintop" speech.

…I'm going to tell you what my imagination tells me. It's possible that those men [who passed the injured man without helping] were afraid. You see, the Jericho Road is a dangerous road. I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, "I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable." It's a winding, meandering road. It's really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you're about twenty-two feet below sea level. That's a dangerous road. In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the "Bloody Pass." And you know, it's possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it's possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" 

But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" That's the question before you tonight. 

I assume it doesn’t take much effort to decode how clearly that applies to the question of the refugees, but just in case: The first question the governors asked was “If we help these refugees, what will happen to them?” But what about “If we do not help these refugees, what will happen to them?” That’s the question before us right now.

…That section got a little more didactic than I’d intended it to, but that is really how I feel, so I don’t see much point in trying to edit it towards a more palatable but disingenuous even-handedness. Moving on.

ONE FINAL PHILOSOPHICAL QUESTION ABOUT AMERICA (AND A TASTE OF MY NEXT ESSAY)

So, setting the philosophy aside once more, the main point of this article is the desire for imagination in how we tackle this problem. Now, perhaps these types of ideas are being discussed all over the place. Perhaps Obama's advisers are frantically trying to map out a way to save every refugee. But somehow I kind of doubt it. I imagine anyone thinking about saving a huge number of refugees gives up before they even get to the planning stage. After all, how could we possibly do something like that when the political will is so against it? When the country is so afraid and so angry?

I’m pretty sure Obama’s approach is that it’s better to focus on the 10,000 refugees plan, one that’s perhaps marginal and reasonable enough that people will accept it. That’s been the go-to play from his administration, and he’s generally been pretty good at playing that chess game. I only worry sometimes that when they want 100% of a plan and the other side wants 0%, they think “Well, let’s just ask to do 30%. That’s reasonable, surely they'll accept that compromise”, but then in the debate between 30 and 0, they get dragged down to more like 10%. Why not propose the 100%? Start way out there from the beginning, and even if it’s still dragged down a lot, you end up closer to the original plan (it’s called the anchoring effect). So, let’s start at a million and work from there, and if we only accomplish 10%? Well, it’s still 10 times more refugees saved than the current plan. But I haven’t heard any major voices pushing for that kind of major, significant increase in refugee admission.

So, when did the rest of us regular citizens stop thinking about how we might solve big problems? Well, we didn’t. I know a lot of people whose brains work in just that way, trying to work through massive problems and make the world better, but sometimes it feels like 99% of that creativity and drive for solutions gets siphoned into the world of tech start-ups and consulting firms. I know a lot of people in those two worlds, and any one of them would be an amazing elected representative or governmental worker, but I'd guess the odds any will consider it are slim to none.

It’s not that people are lazy or no longer want to improve things, or even that they only care about the money (they do care about the world a lot, I promise), they just don’t see the government as a productive path by which to effect change, which is a result of the political stagnation and partisan entrenchment we’ve grown up with. Now that I’ve said my piece on Syria, it actually segues pretty well to what will be my next essay. I have some thoughts about what can we do to get younger people invested in running for office again, and maybe do something about gridlock in the process. Consider that your teaser for Punching The Bursar’s Grandiose Ideas Series, Part II – Project David.

Please comment, text, write manifestoes on legal paper and stick them under my door… whatever method you want to give me your thoughts and perspective. The point of putting this out there is that I’m totally spinning this from thin air and internet research. I know that I know people with way more governmental policy, architecture, engineering, etc. experience than I do, and I’d value input from them, or anyone out there who reads this and has a thought. Everyone has a different knowledge/skill set/perspective to contribute.

And towards that end I ask that if you found this idea at all intriguing (which presumably you did, since you just finished a 5500 word article on it, you champion) please share it around. I just want to hear people bouncing around ideas and discussing this humanitarian crisis as an exercise in problem solving. Seriously, if I didn't think we could accomplish anything by this conversation, I wouldn't have spent weeks writing it. You never know what thoughts could come out of the discussion.

Looking forward to hearing all of your input!

Cheers,
Joseph Labatt