Without a Bow Is It Still a Present?

It was weird going through the local newspapers yesterday, reading the same stories about local elections and results I'd been reading all evening on-line on Tuesday. Perhaps, at some level, I expected the outcomes of the articles to be rearranged when the newspaper popped out of the news box. Of course, that didn't happen, but it served as a surreal ending of one chapter and a memorable beginning of the next one.

We had change in the Norwich political topography--not as earth shifting, perhaps as the 'honey, where do we keep the cardboard boxes?' conversation floating around the Jon Corzine household Wednesday morning (technically Tuesday evening surprisingly early, I suspect) in Trenton, New Jersey, but substantial and substantive change nevertheless.

Two people were automatically not a part of the next City Council as they didn't seek reelection and as three other Council members were each seeking to become Mayor, it stood to reason two folks would be without chairs when the music stopped. And so it was. For the first time since the City Council after Charter Revision was approved in 2001, we'll have three members of the Republican party and four from the Democratic. And for the first time in the entire eighteen years I've lived in Norwich (and I suspect quite some time longer) we'll have three women alderme---persons seated on the same council.

Both of those items may be news or just may be noise. I doubt when any of us went to the polls on Tuesday we blackened in ovals with either object in mind (I do try to form patterns and shapes or make smiley faces-but we needed at least a half dozen more referendum questions for that to occur), but life happens, and in this case change is just what happens when you're busy making other plans. There were a lot of words yesterday, all across the country in the election aftermath, wondering, in essence, 'what do we do?'

I think the question we'll struggle with in The Rose City (not just we like to struggle but because, somehow, we feel we have to at times) is 'what do we do next?' Perhaps because in the course of today, many will pause for a moment to remember a resident, who, though born elsewhere chose to live out his days in Norwich and whose funeral is today, we could promise one another to give everyone we elected Tuesday, whether we voted for them or not, the benefit of the doubt and help them succeed-because when they do, we will as well. We could try that-maybe not a leap of faith, more like a short hop with an element of a skip thrown in for good measure. After all we so often jump to conclusions about dark motives-part of that whole change thing that's goin' around.

Norwich is 350 years old, or young, depending on your perspective. And the election results Tuesday made it very clear it's time for another perspective. We can spin it, grin it, especially if we didn't quite win it, but nothing we can do will change Tuesday's election results. All we can work on is making the best tomorrow we can for everyone, and to best do that, we need to start to work today.
-bill kenny