One Voice, Many Choices

There's a lot more in helping run a city the size and complexity of Norwich than just possessing a desire to help (which I hope we all assume every candidate for office this November has). With so many different people in the same device, creating and managing a consensus to the benefit of the greatest number of residents is both a science and an art (and also involves more than a bit of magic as well as some luck).

We each have two ears and one mouth and my mom used to say the world tends to work better when we use them in that proportion. Especially at election time when the choices we make in the here and now create ripples and echoes that can and often do affect us for years to come. Nobody or political party has a monopoly on good ideas and we should use every opportunity to sample fresh insights and differing points of view.

We devote more time in deciding what we're having for lunch than in defining what we expect from the institutions and leadership our taxes and talent have created for our own benefit. We invest more time reading the comics or the sports scores in the local paper than in learning about the issues confronting and challenging our community and understanding how they impact each of us (and what we can do about that impact).

I attended a presentation last Friday by the Greater Norwich Area Chamber of Commerce, "The State of the City," highlighting both the progress and challenges of our city government, our public schools, as well as community and economic development and it reinforced the importance of developing and communicating a vision of who we are and wish to be as a city and then creating a road map with signposts marking the direction and milestones to help us measure our progress.

Mayor Nystrom spoke about strengthening public-private partnerships and collaborations because our collective whole is greater than the sum of each of our individual parts. We need to do, and to think, more “us” and less “them” (because us is them).

The presentation was my first opportunity to hear a new (to me) perspective from our Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Kristen Stringfellow when she spoke of what she called our school's treasures (and realized they belong to all of us): our children, our teachers, our diversity, and our community.  Norwich is a reflection of each of those just as much as they are the embodiment of who we keep telling ourselves we wish to be.      

An idea offered by NCDC's Bob Mills on Friday morning I really liked was learning from and dealing with ‘disruption.’ I don’t think he meant loud shouting and pointing but rather, to steal from Albert Einstein realizing, 'we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking used to create them,' because both the tools and the times have evolved and progressed. We need to be mindful of that when choosing those seeking seats on the City Council and Board of Education in six weeks’ time. And vote accordingly.

-bill kenny