The Promise (and Peril) of Tomorrow

The last time I had an original idea it died of loneliness, so I very quickly wanted to offer this one in the hopes you get to read it before its ‘best buy date’.

There's a difference between a city and a community. Sometimes one is the other and sometimes not so much. I would suggest the latter makes the former more than vice versa, but we may not necessarily agree on that and as long as we can disagree without becoming disagreeable, I’m fine with just continuing to talk.

I think discussing community and city when trying to define Norwich is worthwhile because I fear we can’t ever get to what we want our city to be for all of us unless and until we learn to let go of what we hold on to from our past. Even and especially when we’ve forgotten why we’re clinging so tightly.

I think of myself as an old-timer, not as that guy who sits on the porch and yells at cars racing down the street, though some on my block claim they do hear shouting emanating from my house, but as someone who, from all the places in Southeastern Connecticut, chose to settle his family here a little over thirty-one years ago. 

I saw potential and promise, not just at the Harbor, but even among the boarded-up buildings lining downtown. After all, who else was using plywood sheets as plate glass windows? The views of the Thames from the heights along Laurel Hill, as well as from Thamesville, were (and are) beautiful, and there’s gritty history on every corner in Taftville and Greenville, and glorious, contemplative solitude in Yantic as well as Occum. 

We, my wife and at the time our two children who are now, themselves, grown and gone adults, settled into a house near Chelsea Parade (I’d scouted the neighborhood and knew Buckingham School was a short walk down Washington Street and Norwich Free Academy, looking more like a small college than a high school was on the far side of The Parade) and, like so many before us, worked to make Norwich our new home. 

Buckingham, like the Greenville School across town, is long gone, victims of shifting population demographics and a tightening of budgets that eventually closed both. Not long after the closure, the buildings were razed, and, at least in the case of Buckingham, it’s easy to pretend there never was a school.  I think every generation of Norwich resident remembers schools that once were but are no longer, so I do not miss what I do not have.

Last November I, along with many others, voted ‘yes’ to construct new schools for children, most of whom are not yet born, just as so many years ago, other residents had supported the construction of the schools that my children attended, not because it was a Republican or Democratic idea but because it was the right thing at the right time to do for the future of Norwich. 

How we made that decision should be the model we use for every decision we make about our city: the greatest good for the greatest number. No more searching for the guilty, for scapegoats, or for reasons why we can’t or won’t do something. Stop looking for do-overs and vow, instead, to do better.     
-bill kenny