We May Be Lost but We're Making Great Time

You take a day off from the noise of the news as I did last week, and you get so far behind they're piping in daylight to you. I thought I closed my eyes but for a moment but when I opened them, we were very definitely no longer in Kansas, and I’d lost both my bike and my little dog.

I was stopped in a local grocery by someone who wanted me to know just how wrong I was recently to encourage people to work harder to get along (my words). That’s not what he read or got out of it, and aside from proving my point I don’t think our two minutes in the produce section benefited anyone.

Dr. Gerry Harvey created The Abilene Paradox which postulates organizations/societies fail because they cannot cope with agreement, NOT disagreement-and because we’ve become a society of people who tell one another what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear, we are getting deeper and deeper in Big Muddy and all of us are too polite to take meaningful action to stop it.  

I’m not sure why we’ve become these people: speaking out in a supermarket to someone who can change no aspect of municipal government as opposed to speaking up at a City Council or Board of Education meeting where there are opportunities to affect meaningful change.  

When you read our history in school, we seem so possessed and driven. But when you dive beneath the surface, the movie's a lot different. We stumbled towards and into Independence--some of the Founders who traveled to Philadelphia in the summer of 1776 weren't firebrands yearning to be free. 

Some of them got hijacked on their way to the Jersey Shore--some were Steve Carlton fans waiting for the founding of the Phillies. KIDDING! (About the Carlton part), but you might’ve guessed where this is going. Accidental Excellence. When we get it right, we don't know how we did it and we can't seem to do it again.

That shouldn’t mean we give up or settle for what we've got. If we used that mentality there'd be BILLIONS of people on the shores of Western Europe, and Africa as well as Eastern Asia (all standing on one another's shoulders by now, I suppose), staring across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans trying to figure out what was going on 'over there.' (And a group of indigenous peoples on the North and South American continents looking nervously over their shoulders.)

And it's that not-giving-up, the-how-does-this-part-go-on-to-that-part of discovery and invention that helps define who we are. We're a nation of loudmouths (I got a megaphone one year for my birthday; I used it to demand pony rides for my next one) who don't always listen to each other's words but who, at the end of the day, somehow, should look into one another's eyes and see the heartbeat behind the polemic and understand the person with whom we are disagreeing isn't evil or ignorant, but just different (and maybe a knucklehead, or is that just me?). 

And they are looking at us in the same way. Walt Kelly's Pogo was on to something, and we could all probably benefit from spending a moment speaking to, NOT at, one another even if in the heat of the moment it’s near the fresh vegetables. Any excuse to lettuce reason together.  
-bill kenny

All of Our Guests Ask Me the Same Questions

Time flies when you’re having fun, I’m told so either we’ve had a lot of fun in these parts since last November’s elections or the cliché isn’t as true as it’s cracked up to be.

In case you missed it (but how?) we’ve swapped out most of our City Council, and have hired a new City Manager, but I’d bet you to dollars to donuts (now that’s a cliché for the ages) that we’re about to have pretty much the same old discussions about the usual topics in our annual municipal budget we’ve had since before there were clichés.

If I had a dollar for every year someone on a City Council has used the phrase ‘this has been a very tough budget year, I could take us all out for ice cream and have enough change leftover for that pony ride for my birthday. I don’t think any of us expect to NOT hear it said again this time around. And I’m sure it’s true.

I’ve lived here for almost a quarter of a century, feels even longer to me since I hadn’t intended to stay, but I’ve heard a lot of the stories about the ‘back in the day’ Norwich, when there was a downtown, when there were neighborhood schools and when the city was a magnet that attracted people from beyond our city limits.

And now, it’s hard times in the land of plenty and an almost wistful resignation and pessimism from so many I meet. I think we use that pessimism as a cushion to soften the shock and disappointment when a good idea ends up dying on the vine because we wanted hope to be just as good as a plan though we certainly knew better.

And as the professionals who run our city departments huddle with the City Manager and the elected leadership to craft the next municipal budget, we are pretty much where we always seem to be and have been in years past for too long and too often.  

When I listen to people at meetings and read comments online in the papers, too many of us focus on what we could lose instead of what we can gain. That wasn’t the mindset that built the Thermos factory in Laurel Hill or created the Ponemah Mills, so what happened?

It’s not a fear of a specific failure that keeps us from doing the things we know we must do to make a Norwich our children will want to live in. It is instead, a fear we have of doing anything that keeps us from doing something. We are in a rut that will end us because the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.

This is the year to talk to our elected leaders but also listen to one another when we speak about what is important for ourselves and our families. Jean-Paul Sartre said, “hell is other people.” He couldn’t possibly have meant us because we are Norwich.

-bill kenny