Saturday starts next year. Seriously. When I look at all the year-in-review retrospectives across the various media platforms, I'm struggling to keep track of where one year ended and the next began. Maybe just me, for most of 2021 I felt a little like the second dog in the sled team; I presumed we were making progress but quite frankly my view didn't seem to change much.
And now 2021 is almost over, and all I can muster is 'now what?' I long since stopped making New Year's resolutions because I know myself too well and don't pay any attention to them after they're spoken/written. Instead, I strive (not always successfully) to identify habits I do have that produce positive outcomes and/or make me feel better and perform them more often.
As I have probably mentioned in this space more than a few times (I saw that eye roll, by the way), I do a great deal of walking. I love the entirely different feel to the city I get while walking as opposed to driving and the topography is such that on a decent weather day (anything with daylight with less than driving rain, snow, and/or wind), I can get in a pretty decent hike, be it around Chelsea Parade until I get dizzy (bad example, actually) or to City Hall or the Harbor, clear my head and offer my family and neighbors a well-deserved respite by being somewhere else in our zip code.
The last week has been pretty much your standard New England-Getting-Its-Winter-Weather on and I'm sorry if you got a sled for Christmas that you haven't had a chance to use (yet), but you will, and meanwhile, even though it was a bit brisk for my tastes, the walks, as long as you kept moving, were pleasant.
I do some of my best thinking while walking (and again with the eye roll?!?) and I got thinking about some points I made, in place of resolutions a number of years ago, and when I dusted them off I was surprised that they didn't really seem any worse for the wear, so I'm hoping maybe this time they'll resonate (ideally reverberate).
As I crisscrossed the Consolidated City District and hiked up and then down Church Street to City Hall and towards downtown, I passed a parked car with a bumper sticker "Cogito ergo doleo" (I think, therefore I am depressed). I'm wondering if it was intended more as a warning or a challenge. I'm more a "Selume proferre" (towards the light) kind of guy but I'm concerned about the lights in our downtown, both keeping them on and getting them to multiply.
Our elected leaders worry about 'feet in the street,' but on most walks across downtown whether I'm trekking to the Burnham Bridge or up/down Franklin Street to the roundabout, or from the Viaduct towards Union Street and onto Broadway I hardly ever pass more than a dozen people, even on workdays.
Maybe I'm just walking at the wrong time (daylight, and/or sometimes evening), or maybe everyone is inside or otherwise engaged. Maybe. Perhaps folks are just shy and don't wish to be seen in public. In that case, mission accomplished.
They certainly don't seem to be frequenting anywhere I walked, making any discussion about creating and sustaining incentives for retail development that much more difficult when the customer portion of "a downtown business" is more absent than present. And it's NOT for lack of effort on the part of all different kinds of entrepreneurs who are putting their money where their sales counters are but whose risks are barely being recognized to say nothing of rewarded.
We talk about revitalizing downtown, but far too few of us seem to feel any responsibility for helping make it happen; that is somebody else's job. If you don't think so, just ask us, in the readers' comments of online news stories or the social media pages, and boy will we tell you. We may not know exactly who should do it, but it ain't us.
Except, of course, it is. Money doesn't talk, it swears and a few carefully-placed swears at the coffee place, juice bar, one of the restaurants or pubs, or the clothing and other shops would be nice to hear. And that's on all of us, and each of us.
Or we can keep doing what we do and avoid shopping local. It'll teach those who've opened small businesses and who struggle to keep them going that we are all talk and no action. And later when we drive to other spaces and places to recreate and retail, we can ask one another why we're surrounded by so many destination locations, and yet we, ourselves, never seem to be one.
And that would be because "Sine labore nihil" (Nothing without Work).
Perhaps that could be our New Year's Resolution.
Perhaps that could be our New Year's Resolution.
-bill kenny
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