The Seductive Safety of Stasis

Rummaging through my notes and journals, I fell across words I first offered about a decade and a half ago suggesting to me in the here and now we're often (and again) in the same movie, but with a different cast. See if you agree.

We're fond of history here in Norwich but we may not realize the danger of allowing who we once were to prevent us from becoming who we need to be.

I've heard a lot, though by no means all, of the 'back in the day' stories about Franklin Square, the sea captains who built houses on Laurel Hill, the Sears and Roebuck (whatever happened to Roebuck, anyway?) store that was downtown and Thursday nights so hectic in The Rose City small children clung tightly to a parent's hand lest they find themselves in the street and lost in the throng.

These stories always have a sepia tinge to them, at least to me, and a soft focus in terms of detail. They always bring a smile to the face of the person telling me the tale. Then we fast forward to the present day and no one seems to know what happened, how, or why. People woke up and downtown was a ghost town-the stores were all gone and so, too, were the people who shopped in them.

My Norwich history starts (and stays) a little more black and white, with extreme contrast and hard shadows, coming over the (old) Laurel Hill Bridge into a ghost of a downtown with plywood for windows and not a soul on the sidewalks in the middle of October of 1991.

That was the year of the petition drives at the local supermarkets to 'Keep the Boat Afloat' as Electric Boat was facing massive layoffs in the aftermath of the Seawolf submarine construction cutbacks. The same region that had no plan for the post-World War II migration of the textile mills to the Deep South had even less clue about what to do with the Cold War’s Peace Dividend when those defense industry jobs became fewer and farther between.

And all these years later, where are we? The same old same old. We all accept Eisenhower isn't still the President and your grandfather's advice about never paying more than $15,000 for a house without a basement doesn't even get you a good used car but we're hobbled by our past, even when/if we weren't here to live it or remember it. Instead of it being a step on the ladder to tomorrow, it's a hurdle on the steeple chase we've made of our lives.

Since everyone has an opinion on what 'Norwich needs,' here’s mine: we lack a belief in ourselves and in one another. Not that it will happen (we’d never even agree on the logistics or the staging), but we should stage a municipal trust fall. Seriously. Let’s put the back into ‘I’ve got your back.’ But we won’t because we can’t. Or choose not to.

With apologies to Alvin Toffler, Norwich doesn't suffer from Future Shock. We are smothered by Present Shock and the fear of acting and owning the consequences of that action. Maybe tomorrow will be better we sigh. Unless and until it's not, then still we sit and wait because if we don’t do anything, we can't do anything wrong. Nothing ever happens if we don't make it happen. 
-bill kenny