I am one of those people who loves living in the city. I also love the country. As far as I know, there is no word to describe such schizoid existence. We have all sorts of “bi” words: bicoastal, bisexual, bilateral, bimonthly, bipartisan, but nothing to describe the need for both the hustle and bustle of city life and the isolation of country life. Would biurban work?

Living in Cambridge allows me to indulge some of my city loves — walking to work, going to a neighborhood restaurant without driving a car, window shopping and book buying, not to mention getting my clothes dry cleaned and my shoes fixed, although there are a lot fewer cobblers around than there were 10 years ago.

It is therefore a bit alarming to begin seeing the decay of one of our more popular destination points, as the Office of Tourism would say: Harvard Square. Oh, the university is still here and quite a few restaurants, but Harvard Square is in deep trouble, and I’m concerned people aren’t paying attention, happy in their denial that Harvard University will deal with it. I thought the beginning of the decline was when the Tasty closed. Geez, I remember all those hearings at City Hall and still the place went kaput, only to be replaced by part of the block housing Finagle-a-Bagel. A bagel does not a hot dog make, and the existence of a high-end jewelry store doesn’t really help. Don’t get me started on the emergence of Four-Bank Corner; you can earn interest now but you can’t buy groceries — Sage’s is long gone, replaced as it was by a purveyor of cell phones that has since closed its doors.

Dave Ortega

It was bad enough that Wordsworth and HMV closed and nothing has replaced them, and more recently that Moto Photo in the Garage has become an empty storefront. But recently I heard there is a chance Casablanca may go and the Brattle Theatre isn’t long for life. These are major calamities that can’t be left to the university or the business community to fix. I appreciate that the city has spent a lot of time and money fixing up other areas of the city with resources for storefronts and traffic projects, but funky Harvard square has become the center for the banking industry as four, count them, four bank branches dominate the heart of Harvard square, including one that talks to you as you pass by. Hasn’t anyone called the License Commission to complain about the noise level of a talking automated teller beckoning depositors like a New Orleans French Quarter barker?

Okay, enough about the banks. But the charm of Harvard Square is going fast, and part of the reason is because rental rates are astronomical and don’t seem to be adjusting to any significant degree to the new reality of the square. A robust shopping area need shops, not just chain stores whose corporate headquarters can manage the upfront costs of the $90 per-square-foot rents sought for some of these storefronts. What made Cambridge funky — and is making Davis Square funky — are the small entrepreneurs who have an idea and burning desire to work a gabillion hours a week to bring their specially designed whatevers to the public.

Don’t get me wrong: There is nothing inherently objectionable about chain stores. I frequent them, but I really like to take my business when I can to local places such as Skenderian Apothecary (which is not in the square, but close enough to be an example) or Leo’s Place, where you can sit at the counter and watch them make your salad and be greeted with a “Hello, where have you been?”

Quite frankly, when I served on the City Council, I didn’t worry much about Harvard Square, mostly because I thought it would take care of itself and because there were larger problems with Central Square and East Cambridge and myriad other development issues across the city. But for my attendance at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, I probably wouldn’t have ventured to Harvard Square much and certainly didn’t, given that I lived in North Cambridge (where you could get your car fixed but not buy a book) and worked in East Cambridge (where you had easy access to the courts but couldn’t find a cappuccino within a block of them) and Central Square (where the business owners were constantly complaining to City Hall for improvements).

Unfortunately, the small-business owners in Harvard Square are not marching down to City Hall and don’t have a favorite councilor who will scream and shout about conditions like Ken Reeves did with Central Square. Nevertheless, it is time to pay attention, not simply because it is Harvard Square and the quintessential focal point of many visiting students; it is because Harvard Square is a quintessential focal point of the soul of this city, stemming in part from its role as one of the education capitals of the world. The vibrancy of the square is what informs the memories of so many people and keeps them coming back — to mingle, to drink, to spend money, to fall in love and to make their way to the river for one last walk along the Charles.

I’ve often thought Cambridge is as much a state of mind as well as a unique place. And consequently, all of our squares — comprising disparate businesses, universities and colleges, nonprofits, homes and the people who inhabit them — contribute to its soul and keep it alive. When core parts go, the rest will suffer.

Katherine Triantafillou is a family law attorney, international democracy consultant and former city councilor whose office is in Harvard Square.

Well, the elections have come and gone and as usual the focus of the conversation is who has won and who has lost and why. Politics in Massachusetts has always been considered a blood sport, and even in the left bank of Boston council races have never been laid back. But I have often wondered how it is that anyone can discern why people win or lose races, especially given that we don’t have anything remotely akin to exit interviews. Although candidates for City Council spend way too much to get elected, I’m not aware of any polling done by them to determine what issues are likely to influence voting, at least not since rent control.

The more interesting issue for me is why the numbers of people voting has gone down and what that means for the people charged with governing. Is there a mandate, as politicians like to claim, for any particular course of action when only 16,070 people in a city of 100,300 (16 percent) bothered to vote in local elections?

Voting, even before I became involved in politics, has always been sacred to me. Looking back, I don’t know the reason I grew up with that notion. My parents voted, but it’s not like we had evening meals peppered with conversations about politics — although my father, the Greek immigrant bar owner, thought all politicians were crooks. And I don’t remember any particular lesson I learned in my civics classes or “aha” moment that made me think that voting was important. It just was.

Chris Zappala

Once when I was part of a team of international election observers in Baku, Azerbaijan, I was stunned to see a man walk into the polling place just as the ballots were about to be counted and drop hundreds of fake ballots onto the floor. I couldn’t have been more shocked to see such overt voter fraud than if the man had dropped his trousers. I kept sputtering to my colleagues, “But this is voting, how can you do that!” as if it were a sacred site that had been desecrated by some heathen nonbeliever.

Some people think it is the complicated voting system that we have in Cambridge that contributes to people’s indifference, although many countries use proportional representation and don’t have the problem of low voter turnout. Ours, however, is a bit more complicated, used only by the city of Cambridge and called the Cincinnati Method. Cincinnati is a lovely city, but why we are using their method of counting votes is beyond me, especially given that they don’t even use it.

When we vote in Cambridge, we use a ballot where we can rank our votes, one to nine, giving people the ability to vote for more than one candidate. That’s pretty cool, as some candidates win our hearts completely or others may have some valid ideas we want to see put into play, and we don’t want to have to limit our choices. It would seem, therefore, that we have our proverbial cake and eat it too: We get to vote for several candidates, ranking them in order of preference and, at the end of the day, the people who get the most votes are elected. You would be wrong, according to the Cincinnati Method, but intuitively correct given most people’s experiences in voting, be it gathered in a boardroom or deciding among family members from which fast food place to order dinner when everyone is too tired to cook.

To be elected to the City Council one must win quota, not achieve the majority of votes cast. The quota is determined by dividing the number of votes cast by the number 10 and adding one. In this year’s election, quota was 1,608. If a candidate reaches that number when all of the ballots are first counted, they are considered “elected.” But determining the winner is not over after the first round of counting, and herein lays the rub of our brand of proportional representation. The next step in counting to find the winner is to determine which surplus ballots will be transferred to other candidates. If a particular candidate reaches quota on the first round of counting, he or she has a surplus of ballots. Those ballots are numbered sequentially, and, according to another mathematical formula too kinky to describe in a family newspaper, those ballots (votes) are transferred to the No. 2 preferences listed on the ballot. This is also done for the bottom of the list; those people who have gotten so few votes that they are excluded from the final count get their votes transferred up.

In practice it feels like an elaborate game of musical chairs, and the only positive I can see from such a complicated system is that it encourages people to run in slates of candidates. The defunct Cambridge Civic Association was quite good at getting their candidates elected because they offered people a number of choices, a bit like the menu at a pizza joint — pepperoni gets No. 1, but I like pepper and onions; I think I’ll take that as No. 2. And so on.

The result is that a candidate can place ninth on the list of initial vote counting but get booted off the list when the transfer votes are counted. This is indeed an odd thing, as some ballots, albeit chosen randomly, have the power to elect more than one person to office.

Our elections are monitored by the Election Commission, and its members are all very good people, but I wonder whether it wouldn’t be worthwhile if they did more with their resources. First of all, it is bizarre to me that election results — official or unofficial — are not posted on the commission’s Web pages for all the world to see more quickly, including the precinct results. (It is even more bizarre to me that The Boston Globe has billboards touting their neighborhood focus and has yet to run any information on the city’s current elections except a short piece in City Weekly about the top vote getters.) Given that voting is down and continuing to go down, why not spend some time figuring out why and what they or the city could do about it? Who are the people that vote and why?

A vibrant democracy depends on many factors, not the least of which is an engaged and informed electorate. Why, in a city where more than half the voters have college degrees and the average wage is more than $60,000, do we not have more people voting? Would weekend voting help? Are we doing enough to educate voters about local elections? Voter apathy cannot all be laid at the feet of lackluster candidates, nor can the civic education necessary to ensure participation of the electorate be confined to campaign literature mailed in a frenzy over Halloween weekend.

Finally, why not jettison the vote-counting system and move to a simple proportional system employed by many cities and countries in the world with fairly good results? At the least, the civic conversation engendered by such a proposal might get the juices going in a city whose raison d’etre has never been indifference, proportional or not.

Katherine Triantafillou is a family law attorney, international democracy consultant and former Cambridge city councilor.

It was on the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918 that President Woodrow Wilson inaugurated the celebration we know as Veterans Day. It was called Armistice Day and intended as a paean to the heroic deeds of the soldiers who died in World War I. Business was intended to be suspended, not celebrated with sales and consumer specials. Such is life in the modern world: Holidays are but another opportunity for marketing, rather than the marking of important events or remembrance of things past.

Consider for a moment Wilson’s words: “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in this country’s service and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of the nations …” Thus the holiday was intended to honor both those who died in service to their country and the peace making that went with the armistice of the Great War, the Treaty of Versailles.

By the time this column is printed, the celebrations in Cambridge for Veteran’s Day will be ended and those who attended — the few veterans and their families assembled in the cemetery, the assorted dignitaries — will have put away their uniforms, their gold stars, their flags, their speeches and the bunting. Before becoming a city councilor, I can’t say that these holidays had much meaning for me. I didn’t have any relatives that had served in the military, and I came of age during the Vietnam conflict. I wasn’t an anti-war activist as some would believe, actually going to classes during college that were blockaded by demonstrators at the University of Michigan. But like many in my generation I grew to hate the Vietnam War and all it came to represent, the lies and duplicity of government and the enormous toll it took on a country divided by its meaning.

Police salute toward the end of the Veterans Day ceremony held Nov. 11, 2005, at Cambridge Cemetery. (Photo: Lawrence E. Miller)

It was therefore with some trepidation that I undertook my duties upon being appointed to lead the Veterans Committee and sent letters to various posts to convene a meeting to find out what these men (they were mostly men) needed from the city. I began to learn a great deal about the struggles veterans faced and the residual conflicts between those who served in World War II and those who served in Vietnam. For the first time in my life I attended collations and events at Veterans of Foreign Wars halls and began to appreciate the refuge such smoke-filled, dark places had for the men and women of war. At one particular meeting I arranged at City Hall, I was stunned to watch the conflict between generations of veterans unfold before me as each side hurled invective at the other for being less patriotic and less strong.

What did these veterans need? Acknowledgement. Attention. Empathy. Respect. Community. Things most humans need, but here it was usually tied to a particular event that changed their lives — a war.

I never understood their fraternity, though, until I left the City Council and worked in war-torn countries, observing firsthand what war does to a community — those who fight and those whose lives are turned upside down because of it. And because it is difficult to describe the emotional impact of bombed-out buildings and empty towns, I found that when I returned home to Cambridge, all I wanted to do was attend a veterans ceremony, as if being around those who had fought in wars would give me some solace, the somber saluting of flags and sound of taps making the horror less vivid or perhaps helping make sense of it.

Wars destroy cities. Wars destroy lives. It is that plain and simple. There is no electricity, garbage collection, phones, television, stores, hardly any food or water, and there are no hospitals. After it is over, there are usually no jobs. After it is over, there are people with horrific wounds, psychic and physical. It brings out the worst in people, and the best. It is the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, only it is brought about by politicians who decide to go to war, rather than by natural causes. It kills our people; it kills “their” people; and no one survives unscathed.

On this Veterans Day week, let us pause to remember things past and present, especially the words of Wilson, who thought it fitting to honor the people who gave their lives to a cause and yet recognized it as an opportunity to align ourselves with “peace and justice.” Acknowledging the one — those who bear the direct sacrifice — does not preclude the honoring of the armistice and the end to conflict. Perhaps if we make an effort to join both aspects, it will help us make sense of why it happens and how we can avoid it in the future.

Katherine Triantafillou is a lawyer, international democracy consultant and former Cambridge city councilor.