When the familiar becomes the comfortable

Today is a mad rush to mailboxes and post offices as it's the deadline for filing federal and state (and in instances, municipal) income tax returns. Brace yourself for lots of stories on TV all day long about the lines forming at post offices, with coffee and other beverage services being offered by any number of folks in any number of locations. There will be follow-up stories, because we're all thinking 'taxes', about Tea Parties this year to protest the rates of taxation (my imp of the perverse enjoyed the fact that the organizers originally called these events 'tea bagging', oblivious to that phrase's other meaning) and all of this is fine without being of any actual value because it generates heat but no light.

Here in Norwich Monday evening, the City Council held its first scheduled public hearing on the City Manager's proposed 2009-2010 budget and the forty-eight of us I counted (I didn't include the two reporters, or any of the City Hall employees who traveled to Norwich Tech to stage the hearing) who showed up were lost in the beautiful and brand-new auditorium of the school (fwiw, the clock on the back wall over the doors is right twice a day, and only twice a day: at six AM and PM. It never moved while we all sat there sullen and silent the other night) and about fifteen offered their reaction and suggestions to the proposed budget and collectively we all went in different directions and canceled one another out, leaving the aldermen and Mayor (whom we elected to lead us by doing what we want (yeah, I know, oxymoronic)) surely to scratch their heads over what exactly we told them.

Tonight at six in City Hall, Room 335, is the first of the council sit down session with the individual departments-it's almost all of the fire departments and the emergency services folks to talk about their requests. Last year, as I recall it, no more than four of us, in a city of over thirty-seven thousand, showed up to listen and learn (ok; in my case, just to listen). What I found curious in the days afterwards was how many (more) people called into the local radio station and rang up the cable excess (access if you want to be polite; I want to be accurate) TV shows to vent without any knowledge of the scope of the challenge or the severity of possible answers.

People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not. Perhaps we should make that the city motto, just in time for the semiseptcentennial. It would look mighty spiffy on a rose red tee-shirt, perhaps as part of a gift set with two Earl Grey tea bags.
-bill kenny