A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Probably on Saturday, NA Confidential’s 7,000th post will go up. I don’t pay attention to the site meter any longer, but hits are above 800,000 and page views at 1.7 million. NAC has more than 700 “likes” on Facebook, without really trying very hard to get them. Barring the unexpected, the blog will celebrate its 10th anniversary in October, 2014.
Mention of these statistics is not intended to produce a round of polite applause. Rather, they speak to a vindication of the blog’s founding principle: New Albany is worth it. What I cannot calculate is how much time I’ve put into this for the past nine years. Whatever the number of hours, they’ve been worth it, too.
Pondering all this, it struck me that quite early on, I wrote a blog post explaining why New Albany matters. Since the essay was published on December 7, 2004, it has been a long, strange trip; a journey off the rails on various crazy trains; and including much of which I’m proud, and other bits I’d like to forget. But the words are all still there, unchanged, as they went down. They're thousands of blue books, and you can grade the blog as you will.
In the following, you’ll see that nine years ago I was pretty hard on Mayor Garner. He proved to be the classic example of a man filled to the brim with knowledge, who struggled to categorize the facts and explain to others what he knew. Otherwise, in terms of themes, “New Albany will be worth the work” strikes me as a template to most of what has followed. It was a marker on my progression to localism, even if the learning curve took far longer than I care to remember.
It has been tiring, invigorating, frustrating and fun. Thanks for reading, contributing, complaining and listening.
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TUESDAY, DECEMBER 07, 2004
New Albany will be worth the work
For those who may find it curious that this web site is devoted to life and times in the seemingly inconsequential city of New Albany, let it be understood that NA Confidential is dedicated to the simple proposition that the place where we live is important.
Otherwise, why bother living there?
For many readers, the significance of a place of residence may seem self-evident, but I submit that this reaction is far from universal.
America’s helter-skelter physical and emotional mobility is its greatest blessing – and its most destructive curse. Mobility promotes flexibility, improvisation and growth. And it contributes to a mindset of transience, substituting long-distance anonymity for the intimacies of familiarity and discourse.
To live and work somewhere, to find that place on a map, to plot the route that takes us there – all are mundane compared to the tasks of building and nurturing a community. To so, we must know who we are, why it matters and how we intend to achieve it.
Individuals make up the community, and the community reflects the dreams and aspirations of individuals. Without vision, without a sense of possibility, without a desire to improve, neither individuals nor their communities can be expected to thrive in a world that never has and never will stand still.
The ongoing process of urban reinvention begins with these dreams and aspirations. Public works, feats of engineering, financial prowess – all are absolutely essential, but none suffice as indicators of creativity and imagination because they cannot measure the limitless horizons afforded by an idea.
Without these vital qualities of community self-knowledge, which aid us in knowing who we are, efforts aimed at “renewal” predictably are undertaken in piecemeal fashion, lack unifying direction, and are doomed to mistake the ephemeral attractions of new objects for the lasting benefits of new thinking.
The architectural carnage of the 1960’s and early 1970’s stands as the perfect illustration of the unwillingness or inability (or both) of a clueless generation of political and civic leaders in New Albany to articulate an ideal for the city.
It isn’t that sincere people haven’t worked for decades before and since to make things better. They have.
It is that much of their hard work has been all but nullified by the continuing lack of an overall, unifying community principle in New Albany, primarily because such a principle is erroneously seen as posing a threat to the prevailing political and civic elites for whom the preservation of fiefdoms, however small, represents a principle more to their liking than thinking outside the box for the benefit of others.
Unsurprisingly, genuine political and civic leadership – thinking, challenging, lifting up, providing the plan, organizing the troops, mustering the energy – has all but disappeared from the equation in New Albany.
As embodied by the self-absorbed empty suit currently masquerading as Mayor, local government seems to have abdicated altogether when it comes to any recognizable principle of community leadership.
At a City Council meeting last evening, where citizen representatives of neighborhood associations spoke passionately about the need to create a position of ordinance enforcement officer and thus provide them with some measure of recourse to influence those who do not contribute to the progress of the community, at no time did Mayor Garner avail himself of the bully pulpit to offer encouragement and empathy to the speakers.
Not once.
Mayor Garner may well be in perfect harmony with the citizenry, and after all, the topic at hand involves enforcing existing codes to make the city a better place, to which there is no discernable opposition, and yet presented with an opportunity to lead, Garner could not be bothered.
Our objective, then, is to lead the community-based effort ourselves, to locate the like-minded, the ones for whom life in New Albany need not represent a grudging compromise, one maintained for lack of better options over the long and steadily unfolding period of time that we hope to remain living here.
Rather, we see no reason why New Albany cannot preserve the best remnants of its important historical heritage while providing contemporary elements of the finer things in life, virtually all of which flower from enhanced diversity – culturally, creatively, artistically.
We know who we are. With unity, we’ll see what can be done.
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