Closing The Divide, 4

So who doesn't hate real estate agents? Who doesn't just love to hate them? They have no ethics, no scruples, no morals. They want to turn a fast buck. What better way to do this than to parasitize off a home-owner's equity? Now, I'm sure they're not all bad, but it is fun in a schadenfreudish manner this little sweet indulgence. I have actually known some rather decent folk who also sell real estate, such as a very nice, enthusiastic Chinese-Canadian woman I knew at a church I was attending a decade and a half ago. I was even then concerned about the possible affects of market greed on this woman's life and faith expression, and one day I tactfully asked her if she could ever see the market bubble over Vancouver real estate bursting and then suddenly everything's devalued and affordable again. Oh, no! she chirped enthusiastically (likely while visualizing her investment portfolio) That is NEVER going to happen. Now this woman wasn't just any kind of church going Christian. She was very keen on discipleship and living a life of Christ that was in all ways exemplary. Except, maybe in one area: her profession. I suspect that when it comes to the deal, she, like so many others become suddenly amnesic of all the moral teachings they inculcated in Sunday school, given they ever went. Rather like an old friend of mine who wanted to go into real estate. He even blithely commented that he believed that Stanley Park, Vancouver's crown jewel of green spaces, should be bulldozed and given over to housing. And maybe a supermall too. On our last visit together, we went to Stanley Park, in his car, of course, since I just couldn't get him to visualize walking anywhere that was further than one block. We wandered around on a couple of forest trails and he was absolutely spellbound by the grandeur of some of the old cedars and firs and the sheer majesty, mystery and full out natural splendour of the place. We soon lost touch with each other and I have no idea what happened to him. He might have actually gone into real estate. Maybe during his darker, more sinister moments (to which this fellow seemed particularly vulnerable at times), he still dreams of a whole peninsula of condo towers, luxury townhouses and supermalls where the firs and cedars once towered in the morning mist. I sincerely hope not. What I am saying here, Gentle Reader, is that it is only too easy to demonize weak, gullible and vulnerable human beings who want to make an honest living, and then swallow the baited hook of greed, and cutthroat industries like real estate are especially moral and ethical minefields. I am sure that some of them are genuinely ethical and that their prime concern is being sure that their clients reap maximum value on the sale of their homes. But it is also saddening, and an indication of these particularly dangerous times we are living in, to realized that likely none of those same real estate agents are going to care a tinker's damn, much less be even aware during the financial transactions of the larger communitarian damage they are enabling through their shortsighted greed. No, I do not hold them in the same light of contempt as our politicians, nor of the developer scum, but they also need to be reined in. Big time.