Holding On While Letting Go

On New Year’s Eve, looking ahead to 2020 and wondering and worrying about pitfalls and pratfalls, I thought one of the low points of the year would be having that pesky Leap Day at the end of February, right in the middle of winter.

And now that extra day of cold and snow seems like one of the Good Old Days. Who knew?

News stories and analysis to the contrary, I don’t think COVID-19 created profound inequities in how we provide healthcare to everyone, how we delivered public education throughout our country, how we struggled and failed to see every single person and their true worth or how we focused our measurement of economic progress almost entirely on Wall Street and forgot about Main Street.  

I do think the virus and its impact in our daily lives revealed and exacerbated our institutional and structural weaknesses and I fear that one of the primary reasons we are struggling and failing to adapt and overcome is because too many of us don’t think we need to or that we should have to.

I try and walk through downtown Norwich once every ten days or so, stretching from Amazing Furniture at Burnham Square back through Franklin Square and up Main Street to where Putts Up Dock used to be. The pandemic’s economic impact on our downtown is I’m sure not even half a drop in the nation’s small businesses bucket but I do know a lot of people with a lot of dreams and hard work were (and many still are) in danger of being swept away despite whatever’s happening on the NASDAQ. 

And I fear that it will be a long time before downtown, ours and anyone else’s gets back to where it was in the winter of 2020, assuming that ever happens at all.

Our children’s schools closed their doors in March and household economics played a critical role in how robust the on-line and virtual experiences were for many of our students.  The chain is only as strong as its weakest link and in our community, dreams have to be rationed for the dollars available so I don’t know what that means for the desired return to classrooms at the end of next month. 

I do know that many of the folks who strongly support school systems’ openings have been MIA in supporting the full funding of those same school systems.

I was a patient at Backus Same-Day Surgery on Monday and got an eye-opening experience with living and working with COVID-19, from the pre-screening testing to the precautions and safeguards everyone at Backus goes through I know not how many times a day and despite watching it happen, I still don’t know how they do it.

I think they, and all those whom we call ‘essential,’ realize bravery is not the absence of fear, but action in the face of fear. And I think they don’t see themselves as brave, but just doing what needs to be done. And what needs to be done is for all of us to follow their examples and keep moving forward. 

-bill kenny