Save Our City? Of course, although it would help to recall that the first rule is “don’t harm the patient.”

“I read. I read for various purposes, and one of them is to learn what my fellow beings are up to.”
Nero Wolfe, fictional detective

Given the increasingly ill-tempered political atmosphere in New Albany during the first half of August, 2005, we’re as foolish to guess when the venom will cease spewing as we’d be to predict when it finally will rain.

If you’re stumbling through the overheated city streets with a lamp held aloft, scanning the pages of the serenely detached Courier-Journal, or perhaps attempting to decipher the coded crayon Luddite scrawling that passes for wisdom in a town never truly comfortable with the concept of literacy -- and searching for a sense of perspective in New Albany -- you just might come away disappointed.

But look more closely. There’s been much good news of late, although it has been lost amidst the kamikaze attacks that have come to characterize the city’s political discourse.

Verily, one cannot uphold the veracity of our city’s approaching rebirth without conceding the inevitability of teething pains, and we’re witnessing this phenomenon now.

The thing to remember is that for each councilman cynically grandstanding to obstruct changes that will expose his brand of quackery for what it really is, there are two or three citizens quietly working to move New Albany forward – preparing business plans, restoring homes and properties, eager to assist in the revitalization of New Albany by applying their entrepreneurial self-interest to the task of creating wealth, increasing the tax base and providing an enhanced quality-of-life for the future.

"Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth."
Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged

For each untutored Scribner Place naysayer who mistakes his own contempt toward a perceived class of people for logic in the larger sense, there are a dozen residents of downtown New Albany who eagerly support the Scribner Place project and see it as a rare phenomenon capable of uniting the community’s most capable visionaries, business owners and hard-working idealists toward a common goal of sustainable redevelopment in the heart of the city.

For each anonymous attack emanating from the ranks of the perpetually disaffected, for whom the chaos of dysfunction is the devil they know, and preferable to the uncertainty of change, there is a reciprocating act of public kindness – and not always because it is this or that person’s job to be kind.

“Baseball is both intensely traditional and interestingly progressive. By progressive I mean steadily improving.”
George F. Will

So do we.

We’re well aware of the problems faced by all cities, most of which owe to a culture of unaccountability that did not manifest itself overnight. Rather, it is a long-term phenomenon, one that has eroded the prestige and self-image of a great many American cities, and it will require long-term strategies and efforts to combat.

Like ordinance enforcement, revised zooming and planning codes and neighborhood involvement.

Each of us has the right to express our unhappiness, albeit on occasion running the obvious risk of assuming that our own dismay is transferable to the world at large, but in the end, is it accurate, fair, or even remotely useful given the work that remains to be done to contend that a half-century’s worth of disappointment can be attributed to the current mayor’s watch?

Isn’t it true that the self-governed are pointing these crooked fingers at themselves? What role have we played during this time? How have we voted? What have been our expectations?

How have we been the solution, not the problem?

For all the insensible clamor, and all the violent rhetoric, and all the bile, spite, envy and simple mean-spiritedness running rampant, there has yet to be conceived or introduced any semblance of a plan or a strategy with which our persistent opponents of progress propose to move New Albany into the 21st century.

Not one.

Neither from CM Dan Coffey, nor from CM Steve Price, although Coffey has a plan to surrender, and Price remains allergic to cell phones and other visible signs of the modern age.

Not from the half-dozen frequent and anonymous posters at Speak Out, Lout (NA), although these ranks likely include at least two councilmen’s wives as well as one prominent contributor who accepts pay packets from the odious regime she so publicly detests.

Neither from CM Bill Schmidt nor from CM Larry Kochert, although both are capable of doing good, but seem helplessly possessed by the worst political angels of their natures during a time when the city needs them the most.

Not from the Main Street G.O.P. headquarters, although like Nixon’s White House, it is diligently recording all of it for posterity.

No, not one of these personages has found the time to step back from the fatally tainted, scheming and conniving politics of the past to bother with putting forth a plan for improving the city.

If only by default, it is left to New Albany’s progressives to move forward.

And we have been.

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress."
Frederick Douglass