We learn many lessons in life. When I was a seventh grader, I was in a large PE class of about 70 boys. When we had dressed for class, coach told us to go the football practice field and line up on the goal line. A friend and I ran with the other boys to the field. He and I stood on the goal line and all of the others lined up on the line at the back of the end zone where the goal post was anchored. We tried to get them to move up to the goal line. Coach walked to the field and made all of them run laps for not doing as he had instructed and not knowing the difference.
 
I had been taught in school that the majority ruled but I had evidence that day that the majority, even the mass majority, can be wrong.
 
I'm currently reading about Jane Jacobs, the journalist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (©1961) that I mentioned in this post. The book is Wrestling with Moses by Anthony Flint. The reference is to Robert Moses, who I mentioned here. That post dealt with the massive urban renewal projects that Moses conducted all over New York City, displacing thousands and thousands of businesses and families and whole neighborhoods.
 
Jane Jacobs didn't agree with the architects, planners, and developers like Moses that saw the buildings and roads as the wonderment of the times. She defended neighborhoods and people. She understood community.
 

From Wrestling with Moses, by Anthony Flint:

 

Two years into Jane's tenure [Architectural Forum magazine], she was given an assignment that would be a turning point in her career—an update on urban renewal plans in Philadelphia. Rather than the new suburban development that was attracting attention at the time, Haskell [her editor] wanted to focus on what was happening to cities. By the mid-1950s, cities across the country had fallen in dire straits, losing population and jobs to the booming suburbs. For decades, big cities had been seen as crowded, congested, unhealthy places of slums and tenements. The condition had prompted a prominent succession of planners, architects, and intellectuals to rethink human settlement—to make it more orderly and efficient. The city was a problem to be solved; great thinkers were coming up with modern ideas, and planners and policy makers were implementing what was universally regarded as solutions.
 
The man at the helm in Philadelphia was Edmund Bacon, who held the same czar-like position as Robert Moses in New York. He targeted the run-down neighborhoods in and around the center city for massive redevelopment schemes, with housing towers and commercial centers replacing the dilapidated buildings and scattered vacant lots. Haskell wanted someone to travel to Philadelphia and gauge the success of his grand revitalization plans. Largely because the staff was shorthanded, he chose Jacobs.
 
Going to meet the great Ed Bacon, Jacobs confessed she was "not what you would call a city-planning expert." But she knew Philadelphia was a grand experiment at the time, and Ed Bacon was very fashionable. She took the train from New York and met Bacon, who escorted her to a section of the downtown area that city was working on. "First he took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it, and he said, well, this is the next street we're going to get rid of. That was the 'before' street," she said.
 
"Then he showed me the 'after' street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire, too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista."
 
She turned to him and asked, "Where are the people?"
 

 
She had lined up on the goal line, virtually alone. It has taken 50 years for her voice to rise above the modernists.