History Is Often a Mystery

Any city, large or small, is more than the sum of its brick and mortar structures, its thoroughfares and infrastructure, its public safety systems, or its schools. 

All of those are, of course, important, but what defines who we are is the degree of sacrifice and work we are willing to invest in developing and maintaining all of those material things for the betterment of all the residents who share a zip code.

Where I live, Norwich, Connecticut, we seem to have the same arguments over and over again, and it's not as simple as 'us vs. them,' though it's often reduced to that. More often, we seem to be 'our past keeps me from seeing the present' allied with 'my fear of the future keeps me nailed to the Now.'

We all know people whose perception of who we are as a city is heavily colored by what we once were. Not long ago, I had someone give me directions by telling me to 'go past where the school used to be at the intersection of Sachem and Oneco.' Okay, not exactly GPS, but still accurate, but only if you go back more than a few decades. Odd how yesterday covers a multitude of sins.

So, too, does a fear of what tomorrow may bring that becomes so great we not only choose to avoid risk-taking, but we choose to avoid even talking about risk-taking. We've decided it's better to have a horrible ending than horrors without end, except we have no proof tomorrow will not be a better day than the one we are having. It's another case of 'the pool ain't in, but the patio's dry' and all that means is we'll save a fortune this summer on swimwear.

My family and I moved here in the autumn of 1991, not that three plus decades have brought any revelations or blinding glimpses of the obvious, other than people prefer problems that are familiar to solutions which are not. I arrived here as a relatively young man and parent, but have no illusions I am either anymore, so I have to guard against situations where I become part of the obstacles that keep Norwich from being a place our children and theirs will want to come home to.

I listen with both fascination and dread when people speak of "historic" downtown buildings, some for sale and some foreclosed, as if there were actual history connected to structures whose best days were before I was born. Imagine how alien that must sound to nearly a third of our city, those residents who are under thirty-five.

What the preservationists espouse isn't just a reverence for the past but more a preservation of their past. That doesn't mean those buildings have a place in my or anyone else's present or future, much less that we should mortgage the latter to artificially enhance the former.

When a past isn't shared, perhaps it indicates a time whose past has passed, and that in Norwich, the time is long passed to keep throwing good money, private or public, after bad on little boxes on the hillside or on dreams our children will never see.
-bill kenny