As cities and towns across Connecticut, and the country for that matter, struggle to develop budgets, define spending plans and refine tax collection and levying strategies for the 'next' fiscal year, facing dizzying energy cost increases and disappearing real estate property values, we seem to grow a bit more weary and surly with every passing day.
In Norwich, CT, where I live, there's been a murmur of discontent at a budget for next year, carefully crafted and explained, that didn't remain flat, with no tax increases. This, despite the aforementioned fuel cost increases that serve as a catalyst for so many other cost increases in both our private households as well as in our public agencies. If I'm paying (today) $3.70 a gallon for regular gasoline I'm not sure how I expect the public school system, with its fleet of buses, to NOT budget and spend more in fuel as well. Or why I get angry when the Board of Education, or the police or other public safety officials, in accomplishing due diligence while working with the City Manager on a budget, forecast higher prices and greater costs. To me, it's like yelling at the TV meteorologist on Thursday night for telling you it looks like rain for Saturday's picnic. Dylan is right, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows but it is helpful to know if it's sandals or snowshoes on Saturday.
In a year in which we will elect a new President, we have a lot on our plates, both internationally as well nationally. Some of us have had the opportunity to work and live beyond our current addresses and to realize there's a world beyond our own front door (something many of our international friends have suggested disapprovingly Americans aren't really good at grasping). Maybe that's how I can look at the price of gas in Norwich, CT, and know in areas of Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, it's in excess of $7.25 a gallon (in fairness to Elmore James 'It Hurts Me, Too' but I keep my sense of humor when the person at the next pump kvetching about the gas price is filling up a Hummer. But it hurts to do that, too.
I watched a Norwich City Council meeting Monday on cable access (I really wish more municipalities would stream video through their servers so we, you and me (but especially me) could watch more easily who/what we elect and pay taxes to support in action, but that and those pony rides for my birthday are going glimmering again this year I fear). Norwich and its residents were trying to create as written rules, some of the limits to the more informal styles in how we live with one another. One man's ceiling is another man's floor and while I say 'news', you may say 'tomato' (or Dan Quayle, but that's another vegetable, and a story for another day), which brings us to how loud is too loud and when is it and who gets to say. For all the talk I hear of a Global village I heard references to 'ethnic music' by one speaker which I didn't quite grasp; sounded like some very old Long John Baldry. The discussion many of the residents had with one another and their alderpersons on how it is we all get along (or not) with one another will continue until at least July before any City Council action on a noise ordinance happens and by then, maybe no, or other, action will be needed as we work to get better at seeing one another as others see (and in this case, hear) us.
Boards of Education are struggling to educate our children and grandchildren in what seems to be an infinitely upward spiral of needs and costs with only finite budgets and resources. More of us, to include yours truly, are graying and as part of that Pig in the Python, the original Baby Boomers, I want everything I've always had (and more), but I don't want it to cost anymore than it did when I was a kid. And so do you. We used to walk six miles up hill, both ways in the snow to go to school, or at least that's what it sounds like to our progeny if we can get them to take off the headphones or put the cell phones down long enough to talk to them. Like our parents and theirs before them (and theirs before them), we lament about 'kids these days' and hope the education factories we're building and funding can keep them otherwise engaged and off the streets until we're old enough to retire and move to Arizona or wherever the good life is this week.
We became the very people we promised ourselves we'd never be. Our parents would be very proud, if they weren't laughing so hard.
-bill kenny
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