There are six phases to most human interaction, be it between people in a family or residents of a city. Those phases are, in order: Enthusiasm, Disillusionment, Fear, Search for the Guilty, Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards and Honors for the Non-Participants.
I'm not sure you'd call it a Natural Law or a Force of Nature-I suspect like a lot of the fables, failings, and foibles of the human race, it's just evolved over a long period of time, and now it is what it is.
I've lived in Norwich, Connecticut for over three and a half decades (for some, I know it feels a lot longer and your objections are noted) and watched as the Wauregan Hotel, Dodd Stadium, the Mercantile Exchange, the Intermodal Transportation Center, and the Occum Industrial Park, just to name a handful of 'game changers,' were, each in their own way, the magic potion, the miracle ingredient, the silver bullet that would undo decades of decay and indifference and return life and people to Norwich.
And every one of those projects has had, at some point, that six-step cycle with special emphasis, it seems to me, on Search for the Guilty. We're just not able to move past setbacks or course corrections unless and until we have someone to blame.
And we all know who we mean even if we never say anyone's name. Most people refer to the culprit as 'them,' which is deliciously duplicitous because every 'them' is also an 'us' to somebody else, somewhere else. The current flavor of the month is an Amazon warehouse slated, perhaps, for the Occum Industrial Park. I say current flavor because it's following the same Six Step Solution of so many other projects.
The trouble with any Six Step Solution is, of course, it solves nothing. We get stuck on stupid and stay there. Anytime we try to revisit a situation and explore an alternative resolution, one of us is always reminded of a time back in the day when someone else had that very idea and 'they' (those mysterious sinister forces again) made sure 'we' couldn't make things right. It would almost be funny if it weren't true.
We have trouble remembering that the fear of making a mistake is, itself, a mistake. And walking away from the notion that it's a good thing if we make no decisions because that way we can't have made a bad decision.
I'd hate to have us fear failing so much we're unwilling to try. Norwich has over 350 years of history, and none of it happened by accident. On innumerable occasions in all those years, someone, somewhere, stopped when others ran, and stood while others cowered and were the new starting point for whatever was to happen next.
We didn't always get it right the first time, but ideally we learn from our mistakes and stop worrying about who is to blame and who is to bless and start over again, when necessary, and keep starting over again until we get it right.
It doesn't make any difference how you got here-it's where you go now that you are here that's important. And where are you? Next to me. And I'm in the place where I have what it takes. And you do, too. If you choose to.
-bill kenny
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