Change Starts Tonight?

Tonight the Norwich City Council has a busy agenda but for many, the most (if not solely) important item on it is the adoption of a budget. It will NOT be a short meeting, and to compensate it will also not be very pleasant for anyone in the room and ultimately the city.

For weeks and longer, many have spoken of shared sacrifice, of lowering expectations, of having more will than wallet, but not to worry, what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable. 

We could have seen tonight coming from as long ago as those many open to the public departmental budget hearings the City Council held earlier in the spring (that next to no one attended) and whose theme always seemed to be 'you're kidding, right? Balance the budget elsewhere and leave me and mine alone." 

How else to understand, when faced with finite funding to pay for all of our municipal goods and services, instead of attempting to accomplish all the necessary municipal tasks AND not tax property-owners until they flee the city, everyone who spoke at a hearing carved up someone else in arguments that made up in volume what they lacked in logic. 

We reached a point as a city that the local papers reported our Board of Education would sue our City Council to get the funding they wanted though where the money would come from was never made clear (probably because no one knew or knows). Not just here, but everywhere at some point we confused an unending flow of money spent on school with "investing in education". 

Let me point out our children, resettled from Germany where they were born and raised, learned almost everything they know about their father's country from their schooling. And for them and for me, this was money well-spent and time and talent well invested, but times have changed and so has language and how it's used. 

In today's environment, a "cut" doesn't mean a reduction in funds; it often means giving me less money than I asked for (even if it's more money than I currently have). No wonder so many people think English is the hardest language to learn, right? At budget formulation, logic and common sense are too often sacrificed for a smattering of applause and a newspaper headline. And so it goes, or seems to until...when, exactly? 

Until we run out of money? Close. Out of patience? Long since there. Out of appetites for new and even newer people and programs, paid for by someone other than ourselves? Looking for the villain in all of this? We should stop looking out the window and start looking in the mirror. 

We do a lot of talking about change but we don't change. And then we wonder why we are where we are.
-bill kenny