"I" Plural Is "We"

I offered this three years ago as we hurtled towards a national election. This local election season the pace is more measured if not halting but the sentiments, I think, bear repeating.

I was teasing with an acquaintance on how very similar, and sometimes too similar small towns everywhere are to one another. Regardless of politics or location, it's often the same movie with a different cast.

Growing up in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in the middle Sixties I was fascinated to read how Washington's army had slipped out of New York City, at the mouth of the Hudson River, under the cover of darkness but fought tooth and nail to hold on to New Brunswick, on the banks of the old Raritan River.

New Brunswick, then, was a lot like Norwich and hundreds of other places you can think of are now. Varying degrees of plywood windows, people mourning long-gone shops and merchants, and a variety of other suburban ills, real and/or imagined. (back then, no opioid plague but lots of other secret sins and vices.)

They are mostly populated by those who chose to stay but didn't (and still don't) always know how to stem the ebb of vitality and by the ghosts of those who departed. They have stories of past glories we, who are not from here, have heard all the years we've lived here and no longer care about. Your Reid & Hughes building is my George Street Playhouse. No rights, no wrongs. Just us at this moment.

Economic development, achieving and sustaining it, will, I hope, be the primary theme as we near November because one of the concerns I have when we look at the small towns so many call home, or here, is how we attempt to return to a point in the past that can never come again, and we make that idealized version of what once was into a definition of what we wish to be.

When I returned to New Brunswick in 1991, where there had been a ghost town, there was now a downtown, full of shops and people. I had returned to my roots but I didn't recognize the tree. That didn't and doesn't make it 'bad', and for my children, who never lived there, and for those whose children grew up there, it's all the town they've ever known.

When the past keeps us from seeing a future, we need to shift the present.  

Same is true right here and now.

No one steps into the same river twice because both they and the river have changed. And while it's probably healthy to mourn what we miss, getting stuck in someone else's reverie will not help us get to where we want and need to be however you define tomorrow.

A life without risk is safe, but not much of a life because a life without risk is a life without the joy of reward and who wants that? Innovation, Invigoration, and Invention all begin with "I"-that's probably not a coincidence, but a call to arms.

-bill kenny