Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Boarded Up Windows, the Empty Streets

Those words are actually from Bruce Springsteen’s “My City of Dreams” a song written a decade ago about his (near) hometown, Asbury Park, New Jersey, but I think they ring as true for us here in the Rose of New England.
To be honest, that's what Norwich looked like to me when I drove over the (old) Laurel Hill Bridge through downtown the weekend after Columbus Day 1991 looking for someplace my wife and our two children, still in Germany, would call home when they arrived here (as they did the week before Thanksgiving).

It was a Saturday afternoon, and all these years later, I now know that's not a time of the day (or day of the week) where 'downtown' looks like anything resembling a bustling and hustling metropolis. But I’ve also learned that looks can be deceiving and there’s more to downtown (and across all of my adopted hometown, actually) than meets the eye. You have to know where to look.

Now, as then, there are some hearty and hard-working entrepreneurs logging 856 hours a week, it seems, to eke out an existence as (too) many of us drive past, windows rolled up tight, on our way to malls built farther and farther away from where we live.

Is 2010 the year we start to finally change Norwich back into a place where our adult children will want to come home to, or from which all who have the wherewithal to leave, will flee with a haste that borders on the unseemly as a retreat becomes a rout? Pardon an outsider’s observation, and after all these years I concede that for many, I’m still NFH (Not From Here), but we don’t know how we got here, and, more importantly are unwilling to work together to get to where we want to go.

We need to stop waiting for Hartford, which is politically and financially exhausted, or for Washington, D. C., which is too far away, even more broken and has too many of its own problems, to ‘save’ us. And we need to finally wake up from the recurring dream we have of finding that one big development project that will transform the three rivers upon which we were founded to flowing honey and the falling raindrops into gumdrops.

The only help we can count on, and should, is the assistance we give to ourselves. If we're looking for a helping hand, look no further than the end of each of your arms-that's two and that's a start. If you join hands with those of your neighbor, we have an initiative--and if three of us work together, it’s a movement. Every person, every building, every block and every neighborhood, one community. We've seen the hard way what working to benefit only ourselves has gotten us--a society of sharpened elbows and people not afraid to use them. Many have stopped trying and so we have to pick them up as we take ourselves along to where we need to get to in order to rebuild and rediscover the spark in the dark that made us the nation we are.

I've always suspected had the Native Americans who greeted the Pilgrims realized their guests were not going to assimilate or be interested in learning very many of their hosts' customs, that first Thanksgiving meal might have been more 'to go' than John Alden and Miles Standish could stand. But what were their choices, and what are ours? It's not ever easy, and it's not instant, but we're not in this life, or nation, or circumstance, alone. And we can do this-because, when you get through with all the platitudes, because we have no choice. You're burning daylight, sitting here reading this, my friend. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.
-bill kenny

2 comments:

Adam Kenny said...

My City of Ruins struck the world as particularly poignant when Bruce sang it on the 09/11 telethon a week or so after the attacks and when he put it on The Rising a lot of folks figured he'd written it for NYC about 09/11.

Having known - as you pointed out - that he wrote it for Asbury Park makes it to my ear all the more poignant. No enemy attack ruined 'his' city. It was an inside job.

William Kenny said...

Walt Kelly's observation, via Pogo, on who the enemy too often turns out to be is too well-known to be forgotten or ignored, try as we might to do both.

Now and Zen

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