Overcoming Triskaidekaphobia

New Englanders are made of hardy stock, I'm told-both those who arrived on the Mayflower as well as those whose goods and furnishings came in one of their moving vans. There's a long tradition in these parts of independent thinking and action that predates even the ready for anything state of mind the Minute Men came to embody in the War of Independence.

Generations of selfless sacrifice seemed to run into a stone wall Tuesday a week ago on Election Day at least here in The Rose of New England. There's nothing more local in the body politic than municipal elections and that's what we had here. Or at least that's what I thought was going on.

As you should know by now, the voter turnout left a lot to be desired. My initial reaction when seeing the actual turnout percentage,13.5%, was to assume many of us had succumbed to our fear of the number 13, triskaidekaphobia. I leapt, more like lurched, into action and attempted to reach Hugh Laurie, TV's Dr. Gregory House, and persuade him to facilitate the return of everyone's favorite 13, Olivia Wilde, to the show.

But like Saul on the road to Damascus, I had an epiphany. William Vaughn, a columnist for the Kansas City Star, once observed "a citizen will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote in an election." I'm not sure he was joking, but I do think I caught a glimpse of his larger point.

When people have the right to vote, it follows as night the day, they also have the right to NOT vote if they so choose. As George Jean Nathan, who gave cynicism a good name once observed, "Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote." When the top vote-getter in this year's City Council election was named on less than 10% of all registered voters' ballots and still won handily, that's a reflection of systemic, not individual, failure on a scale and scope beyond a drive-by observation in a blog. Or should be.

In years past, we had candidate forums from shortly after Labor Day through Halloween at least once a week. This year we had less than half a dozen total and they were spottily attended (I'm being charitable). Despite my belief that my neighbors weren't happy about the rate, pace and direction of changes in Norwich, the turnout suggests they were and perhaps decided they had better things to do than vote for what many may have seen as more, or less, of the same flavor.

We've all heard "Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan." We can spend the next two years running paternity tests on every registered voter we can put our hands to, or we can join our hands together and continue (as halting sometimes as our progress has been) to attempt to design and build the city we want to live in tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.

-bill kenny