Comfortably Numb

Mother's Day this Sunday and Memorial Day near the end of the month mark the transition from spring to summer. They're perennial harbingers of our changing seasons even if we're distracted by ongoing murmurings and mumblings about the city's next budget and where the money goes (we know all too well where it comes from).

What we are now, as residents of Norwich and as neighbors of one another, is what were were when...we made the decision to live here perhaps because our families did or because a job relocation brought us here or maybe we saw an opportunity or the potential for personal or financial growth and chose to reside in The Rose City. In my case, I'm still waiting for those three magic beans I traded the car for to germinate. Any day now.

Whatever the reason, and the optimism and hopefulness that late Spring inspires aside, you now have also one for why you choose to stay. Let's face it, the last couple of years have been unkind to many across the nation and in these parts if you've been living hand to mouth, sometimes your fingers have been very close to your teeth.

We all have neighbors who've walked away from houses they can no longer afford, who have departed for points yonder where the cost of living is a bit less and where the dollars they earn go a little farther. But we've stayed. And therein lies my quandary. After living here with my family for a skosh longer than twenty years I still don't understand why so many of us have/ feel no sense of ownership for where we live.

We regard city government as something done to us and rarely, if ever, for us. I see the same handful of faces and engaged residents at City Council meetings. I confess, with our children grown and gone, I don't attend Board of Education meetings any more (to the vast relief, I'm sure, of its members) but I concede I'm taking the coward's way out because the success (and failures) of our schools are as much mine as they are yours.

I can recall a decade and a half ago, a City Council hearing on an annual budget that started out in City Hall and hours before the meeting started was relocated to the (not yet renovated) Kelly Middle School gymnasium which was packed (to include, I'm sure, a very nervous Fire Marshal) with residents who wanted to make sure their alderpersons heard them and their opinions on spending and investment.

Maybe those are the residents who have moved away because in recent years we've routinely seen sparse attendance in Council chambers. I keep suggesting we offer those in attendance pudding but the cost of cups and spoons is prohibitive.

We don't like many of the decisions made by the neighbors we elected, usually after the recommendations of other neighbors on the nearly four dozen (!) advisories, boards, commissions and committees we have here in Norwich. Many of those volunteer panels have vacancies that go unfilled for months and years-not that any of us in the public notice since so few of us ever attend those meetings.

It's strange how quickly we react to decisions which are the outcomes of meetings we choose to not attend, though strange may not be the best word. During our last city elections, less than 15% of us who could vote, did vote (it was really less than 14% but I was trying to be nice). It's okay to complain about the landings but it's better if you show up for the take-offs and learn to be less comfortably numb.
-bill kenny