Meet the Faces Beyond the Window's :Pane

I try to not be 'too hip for the room,' as we used to say in radio, and cast a wide net in terms of topics. In that spirit, if you don't live in Norwich, Connecticut, today might be a good day to skip this space in the ether. 

Consider yourself duly cautioned. 

This is the text of an email I shared with our Mayor and members of our City Council last Thursday on the "Panhandling" ordinance on tonight's agenda.

"Mayor Nystrom and Members of the Norwich City Council.

I am writing to share my dismay and disappointment with the “New Business” ordinance on your Tuesday, 21 January 2025 meeting agenda.

I’m accused (with some accuracy I concede) of being cynical but to propose this ordinance the day after we celebrate the birthday of Dr. Martin Luter King, Jr., who wrote in 1966, “Our nation is now so rich, so productive, that the continuation of persistent poverty is incendiary because the poor cannot rationalize their deprivation,” takes my breath away for sheer audacity.

I’m old enough to remember (vaguely) President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ and his War on Poverty. Sixty-one years later, this proposed ordinance is a through-the-looking-glass effort to wage war on the poor themselves.

With all due respect, it does NOTHING to reduce, eliminate, and/or alleviate the causes of poverty and near-poverty of too many Norwich residents. My parents raised all of us to accept that no one is immune from hard times even in this, the Land of Plenty.

All of us see those who stand at the intersection of Washington Street and the Sweeney Bridge, among other locations, or the entrances to the Norwichtown Commons and other shopping areas throughout our city.

Do ANY of us think those holding those cardboard signs regardless of the elements are there by choice? What sane person would choose to spend a day in the fifteen-degree chill of winter or in the heat through which we suffered last summer?

Your ordinance doesn’t help anyone who lives in a tent or sleeps in their cars (assuming they still have one) or couch-surfs (if they’re lucky) on a friend or family member’s sofa. Its intent seems to me to be to banish ‘those people’ as much as possible from public view.

How shameful and selfish.

Instead of attempting to address underlying causes including a lack of affordable housing, substance abuse, mental health concerns, food insecurity, or the dearth of employment that provides a living wage, this ordinance punishes the poor for being poor and not having the decency to either move somewhere else, preferably out of our collective eyesight and consciousness or die.

We cannot tell ourselves we are the richest nation on earth and in the history of the world and then treat those who, for reasons often beyond their control, have so little of those riches, with contempt and disdain.  

I don’t pretend to have (any) solutions to systemic poverty and inequality of opportunity, but this proposed ordinance is an embarrassment and abomination.
We are better than this; dear God, I hope we are.

Thank you for considering this letter. I hope you do the right thing on Tuesday evening and choose a different course of action.

Respectfully yours,

William Kenny"
-bill kenny