My wife and I have lived in Norwich a couple of weeks shy of thirty-five years. Sometimes it feels a LOT longer than that because of a sense of foreboding, a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop state of mind so many of us seem to have.
The current buzz on social media platforms in our area is shouting and pointing on both sides about a proposed Amazon distribution center in the newly created Occum Industrial Park. Many Occum residents liked their village just the way it was, and the notion of an industrial park, hopefully to attract commercial enterprises to expand the Grand List and lower the tax burden on homeowners, was greeted less than enthusiastically. Having Amazon as a possible neighbor operating 24 hours a day, every day just down the street hasn't quieted their concerns.
There's a sort of tradition in Norwich, probably going back to the Nine Mile Square, I suspect, that causes some residents, new and old, to assume the worst from the moment any initiative is announced, perhaps to avoid the rush, or, more likely, because they've concluded the advantage of pessimism is that you can only be surprised and never disappointed. In that sense, Amazon is just the latest in a long line of projects. It may be time to reconsider that mindset.
For decades we've all listened to laments about missed opportunities, bad luck, poor faith, lack of working capital as the municipal Grand List puttered along at a rate of growth just above that of inflation, which basically meant we've had no real growth at all.
Of course, if you've looked at municipal infrastructure from roads to sewers, class sizes and extracurricular offerings for students in public schools, manning and staffing of public safety agencies and, most immediately and importantly, your property tax bill, you already knew all of that.
The small businesses that quietly folded or relocated to another town, the forest of 'For Sale' signs scattered throughout every neighborhood, and the families everywhere who just stopped being our neighbors from one day to the next and disappeared have all become part of who we are and how we live.
So far, our response to decades of decline has been to complain about it loud and long, and with the advent of social media, electronically too. I'm gobsmacked at how many folks click a mouse and add a mad face to a disparaging comment they agree with, no matter the subject. We've forgotten it takes a lot more energy to be a light than a horn, and we're going deaf without hearing what anyone is trying to say.
Old New England towns, and that's what we are, are a tough sell for industry at any time. The Amazon project is not a silver bullet and will not allow us to leap tall buildings in a single bound, but it is an incremental step in a forward direction in a small town that has allowed itself to believe for too long that going in circles was progress.
You don't have to be Catholic to appreciate the importance of critical mass, which is the existence of sufficient momentum in a social system such that the momentum becomes self-sustaining and creates further and future growth. In other words, one thing leads to another.
Is every idea worth investigating? Yes, and weighing costs and benefits for all of us who live here. Just putting the "No" in Norwich doesn't help us do anything. Where we are in ten, twenty, or fifty years is in direct relation to where we go today and how we choose to get there.
We're starting to see a glimmer of what can be when we put aside the petty and personal private agendas and define a destination and work as one to get there. How far we go is up to us.
-bill kenny
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