Driving through Taftville the other day, heading to the post office, passed a house with three or four lawn signs all reading "Norwich City Council Sucks." Brevity being the soul of communication, I understood almost instantly what the signs meant. The owner still had a 'Get Fired Up-Support Your Volunteers' lawn sign as well, and to my eyes, didn't have a lot of lawn left (which is a clever way to avoid mowing, I guess).
There's been a months-long argy-bargy involving our City Manager and the Chief of the paid fire department, and three of the four volunteer fire departments, about what, I'm not quite sure. It started out as a shouting match of sorts, 'I'm the Boss!' 'You're not the boss of me!' 'Oh yeah? Yeah!' and is now 'We'll see you in court.'
There is no happy ending to any of this, and that is more than a little sad, as we're doing great things as a small city in Southeastern Connecticut, and I think the only direction we're heading is up.
We're conveniently forgetting, as is so often the case, not everyone gets everything--it's true in government as it is in any other relationship, so perhaps we might spend a moment and define what our relationship with our city government is, and/or should be.
We form governments, local, state, and national, to do for us collectively what we, as individuals, are unable or unwilling to do for ourselves alone. Some of the tasks are easy--provide for the national defense. Some are harder to define and execute, providing a quality education for our children to enable them to be productive members of our society as they become adults.
The challenge is in the details. Compound all of that by putting a price on each action, and every step of each action, until the municipal budget exceeds one hundred and sixty-seven million dollars. That's a lot of money and a lot of responsibility.
I voted for neighbors, known and unknown to me, who volunteered to do their best as they saw it on my behalf, no matter how I felt, personally, on any given issue before them. And I believe with possibly two exceptions, all of them are trying to do just that. The open question, regardless of the issue, is: do you do something right, or do something right now?
Politics is often called 'the art of the possible', but we, the people (at all levels of government), can make that art impossible by elevating our expectations and the volume of our voices when speaking about our expectations.
Not helping matters is our representational form of government, where, from the speaker's podium at a city council meeting to and through the curtain at the voting booth, we can drown out one another if we work at it.
No one wants to have fewer policemen, or more children in a school classroom or a library that can't be open to serve the general public in need of its services, or gaps in our fire protection and public safety.
A lot of us remain very unhappy at the state of affairs in The Rose City and the rate and pace of change and improvement still needed. But we have to work together. To discover and then celebrate the commonality of our shared vision of what we want Norwich to be, and decide how important our differences are in pursuit of a common goal. To stop saying 'this is the way,' and start saying 'let's find a way.'
Hurling invective at people with whom we disagree will benefit no one. We can disagree without being disagreeable. Sadly, I fear that won't fit on a lawn sign.
-bill kenny
