Jump

Even if you are no more than a casual reader you know that where I live now is not where I was born. I was born in New York City. My parents and their friends moved to New Jersey when I was a toddler.  Jersey was one of two places that Eisenhower-era young married New Yorkers (YMNY) moved to when they had a few bucks.

When YMNY had MORE than a few bucks, they moved to Connecticut, to the Gold Coast, not this part of the state, east of the Connecticut River and almost in Rhode Island. Until the two Native American casinos came along, this part of the state was known for Mystic, on either side of 95 North as folks headed to Cape Cod for their vacations.

There a lot of places in the new england (deliberately without capital letters) built along the banks of rivers that powered the textile factories that disappeared in the late Forties and Fifties because cheaper labor in the Deep South shifted the industrial footprint only to be, in turn, destroyed by even cheaper labor half a world away.

This new england doesn't suffer from Future Shock, but present shock. There are many here who hold on to the past so tightly, believing it will return though they know not how, that they cannot understand how much life and times have changed or how far behind they have fallen.

They watch with a mixture of suspicion and hope as every 'new' person or 'new' idea is presented as The Next Big Thing and when that definite article proves to be less than advertised, their feelings change from disappointed to deceived, and they neither forgive nor forget.       

Much of what I’ve seen in Norwich in the three-plus decades I and my family have lived here is a change in the direction of the circles in which we run. As if the running were itself a plan. We elect new brooms to sweep old dust-or choose old brooms to leave the dust alone. It makes no difference, least of all to the dust.

We were talking about downtown revitalization when I arrived here, and we're still doing it-and that's NOT accidental. People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not.

Those of us who didn’t grow up here will never be “from here” no matter how long we live in Norwich. Every discussion about this city becomes ‘this is a Norwich thing, and you don’t understand.’  
Maybe.

But here’s something all of us can understand about those of us not from here: we are less wedded to a past we never had and more willing to risk our present for a desirable future for ourselves and our families. It’s the New Math: the less you have, the less you have to lose.

It’s not that, as a city, we haven’t meant well in Norwich. We have had armies of people, on a variety of committees, commissions, agencies and boards, each with a tiny piece of the economic development puzzle, struggling to make a breakthrough and somehow hit a game-winning grand slam home run.

And plans! Brother, Sister-there are rooms in our City Hall where you can't swing a wombat, or other small animal, and not hit yet another development study, nicely bound, never read, right on a shelf. 

Words, to include these, are only words. Ability, agility, and most of all action are what matter. Do something.
-bill kenny