Happy New Year?

If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten. This is how Norwich, Connecticut, finds itself today as it begins the next 350 years and all of us who live here, to many degrees, are both surprised and disappointed at the same, tired results. I don't pretend to know if it's true as well where you live, though I have my suspicions. President Jimmy Carter, perhaps presciently three plus decades ago, called it the "American Malaise." I think he belled that cat.

Norwich, like it or not, is a city with a reduced economic development opportunities (and still lacks a fully articulated plan to create an enhanced one). The City Council has spent three consecutive Saturdays in workshops trying to agree on a destination, and fashioning a map with milestones and markers to help us find our way. It’s a brave start and they’ll be the first ones to tell you they cannot do it alone. And those of us who live here shouldn’t let them.

This past November locally we had ten candidates seeking nine seats on our Board of Education. We had thirteen candidates for six places on the City Council and the good fortune of four neighbors seeking the office of Mayor. Some might say we were spoiled for choice. And yet voter turnout, the critical element of any effort to improve where we call home, remained at about the same levels it has been for too many years. The feeling that government is something done to us and not for us, trumps all the brave talk about regionalization, mill rates, enterprise zones, zoning variances and the other nouns, verbs and gerunds of political grammar.

Perhaps too often at times, we have allowed everyone (and anyone) with a self-printed business card that says 'developer' to talk with us about how little of our money will be needed to get our fences whitewashed, only to find out, too late, we’re on the hook to buy the brushes, the whitewash, the paint and, sometimes, even the fences. We choose to forget that everything, to include missed opportunities, comes with a price and a cost. As much as it would bother me for this to wind up as my city's motto, there are times I fear it's already a national mindset.

We wait for someone, somewhere, to rescue us overnight from a situation that took decades to develop to the point we are at now, and cast about for someone to blame as a part of any attempt to find a solution. Those whom we’ve elected will soon enough feel the sting of our disappointment if they fail to guess what we want before we ourselves know what that may be, or how to achieve it. That’s unfair and all of us need to do better.

We need to learn to speak and work with one another to better use ideas, ideals and words to build bridges that join rather than walls that continue to divide. "...(A)fter a while, you realize time flies. And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you ..."

The New Year and a new decade starts Friday. What better time to begin, again?
-bill kenny