No One Wins Unless Everybody Wins

Call it serendipity or with apologies to Bob Dylan, a simple twist of fate. We’ve put over one hundred million doses of anti-COVID vaccine into arms across the country and, right on time against all odds, it looks and feels like spring has arrived. Moments like this I recall an oft-quoted Albert Einstein observation, “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” 

Without attempting to channel Cal Lord whose Friday Bulletin columns I read religiously (and yes, I went there), I am always caught up short when the bubble I’ve been living in and mistaking for ‘the world’ reveals itself to just be my private Idaho and that life’s big and little moments happen whether I can recognize and/or acknowledge them at all. 

So often, so many of us (present company included) confuse cause and effect in much the same way a rooster might think that because he crows the sun comes up. For a lot of us, the world has been rather dark for over a year so I think we can be forgiven for hoping we are turning a corner and stepping back into the light. 

As a professional oldest child (in a big family) I must try to pull the euphoria handbrake at least a little bit while warning that things may be looking up, but we have got a long way to go to get back to pre-COVID and pandemic life. Yes, there are bright spots, nationally as well as locally but times remain tough all over-, we feel it in our households, throughout the city, and across our nation. In this instance, perceptions of reality and reality are very much one and the same. 

Money, its presence, and more especially its absence, drives every discussion and the easiest way to silence someone’s advocacy in support of a program, policy, initiative, idea or ideal is to ask them 'and how will you pay for this?' The silence is deafening. 

And while we just marked the start of Spring over the weekend, a more immediate concern on our collective calendar will be approaching hard and soon, involving the development and adoption of our municipal budget. The budget always involves painfully hard decisions that those of us who do not have to make them invariably find infuriating when made by those who must. 

Municipal budgets have been hard to construct in my memory for decades. I seem to remember hearing the phrase ‘a particularly challenging task’ to describe the annual formulation process just about every year since very nearly forever.  

The annual budget is the hardest part of the job that our neighbors who volunteered for the Board of Education and the City Council must do each year; not that the rest of their calendar is a picnic. And I suspect they are not helped by folks like me in the cheap seats sniping at them in print or at public hearings, but they persist, and we should all be grateful that they do. 

Again, this year, our city is facing ‘a particularly challenging task,’ so before it gets too much farther along let’s promise one another to hear each other out and keep an open mind when weighing wants and needs. No one wins unless everybody wins, so let's find a way to win.
-bill kenny