Normally on Mondays, I like to preview the week's meetings in Norwich. As this one, week #52, winds down, there are NO municipal meetings slated by any of the advisories, boards, committees. commissions or City Council. If you're looking to close a road in Mohegan Park this week, you'll just have to do it yourself (but do it quietly; we almost have a noise ordinance).
I'm not going to waste your eyes telling you what a turbulent year this one has been. If you're still above ground as you read this, you already know that and you know it from far more authoritative and knowledgeable sources than from a pinhead like me.
I had a successful year, professionally (= I didn't get 'right sized'. In this employment environment, especially in light of what I do for a living, that's a major achievement). Personally, I practically monopolized my wife's free time with two emergency room visits and one actual hospital admission. Towards the end of the year, I started on my own version of HBO's Entourage, but in this one my posse all wear white coats and have initials after their names. I have become a science project, not quite as interesting as a Plaster of Paris (hilton? "That's hot!" not) volcano and closer to one of the dice that God throws while playing with the universe (explains that black dot on my forehead.) My children, who are adults whom I still see as being nine and four years old, respectively (damn glasses!), are happy, which, as they explained in Dad School, is the crust of the biscuit and the point of the exercise.
I wasn't born here in Norwich, I just live here now, and so I already look forward to 2009 in the hopes that the brave start I was looking for this time last year, I will find this year, politically, economically and philosophically. Norwich celebrates its 350th anniversary of its founding and it looks like the celebrations may be a little light on some of the frills and thrills so many had hoped for. We have one another and the resolve to work harder and smarter and I think that's a big part of what we need, not just in the New Year but for for everyday and not just in Norwich, but across the country.
A lot of the challenges we face in 2009 we've been staring at for quite some time: energy independence, aging infrastructure, failing educational systems, an absence of affordable universal health care, the tenor and tone of our debates on those issues and a hundred others--this needs to be the year we stop looking away. If not now, when? If not us, who? Now is the time. We are the people.
-bill kenny
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