I Would Love to Stand Here and Talk with You

I recently endured a birthday (I would only use 'celebrated' if there'd been a pony ride (inside joke) but there wasn't. Again.) and I've taken to seeing repetitions and patterns in many instances and situations where perhaps they've actually visible only to me. 

Looking at where we are in the City of Norwich Budget Adoption Process (I'm working on a line of commemorative tee-shirts and coffee cups with a booth at the foot of the stairs at City Hall but capital letters is a good first step), all I can keep thinking about is how (much more) often we're going to continue in the same cycle of propose, react with alarm, scale back a little, grudgingly adopt while vowing next year will be different and then starting again the following year as if this one had never happened. Sort of like lather, rinse, repeat while watching Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (and now you where today's title is from). 

If Captain Yossarian in Heller's Catch-22 received a medal for going around the bridge twice, what time do you think our awards parade will start and who, among us, won't be marching in it? People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not, and that's why we keep having the same dangling conversations with one another on the same aspects of our municipal budget every year. 

And then we're surprised, no, that's not the right word, shocked is the word I should use, just shocked that the same challenges we failed to rise up and address last year, and the year before, and the year before that, are still here and still unresolved. 

Talk about tradition. Which is what we do, talk. Mom used to say we had two ears and one mouth for a reason and we should use them in the same ratio, but too often we use public meetings and social media platforms to make sure we keep the No in Norwich. And then we make passion personal and become disagreeable while disagreeing (or am I the only one in this whole city like that?).

Monday night's City Council meeting with its tentative adoption of a preliminary budget for the next fiscal year should be an invitation, an incitement if you wish, to step up and speak out at this coming Monday's Second Public Hearing to tell the City Council on what and where you want your tax dollars invested. 

And yet, as so often happens, not enough of us will make a good-faith effort to offer realistic, reasonable, and reasoned proposals and counter-proposals to those on the City Council attempting to do what's best for as many of us as they can (even those of us who yell at them).    

The trouble isn't our words, however, it's the absence of willingness to transform words into actions. There's never a shortage of nay-sayers with a litany of 'coulda, would, and shoulda' because hindsight is always 20/20. 

Any success we hope to have in continuing to create the city we believe we deserve lies in bringing together pragmatists, visionaries, discouraged experts, enthusiastic beginners, and everyone in between because Norwich needs (just about) all of us and all the talents we can offer.  

Break the cycle. Otherwise, we'll do this all over again, next year.
-bill kenny