The Dangers of Pronouns

If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede in my case, I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we're talking in glittering generalities about how 'somebody needs to take on for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head.  Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.

We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto tends to become 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.' This Monday in all likelihood on the Norwich City Council agenda will be a motion to adopt in some form, to include revised beyond recognition, the City Manager's proposed budget from April 2. It will be interesting to watch the negotiations at the front of the room, realizing they impact everyone in the room.

You remember the City Manager's proposal: another opportunity in the hearings and discussion leading up to Monday night to use pronouns like "us" and "we" where, instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one liked, to include the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)

Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an artform when it suits our purposes. "Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.

Every year we have the same furtive tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more  for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, pony rides (had hoped to slip that one by you), capital improvements and investments.When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.

Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? The insistence on turning out dozens or hundreds of school children to serve as human shields at Council deliberations has gotten old, but still we do it and those who believe it is effective swear by it and those who are unmoved shake their heads.

Don't forget all of "us" support enhanced public safety but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny