Running Away Or Into the Fray

Last year someone wrote a letter expressing their feelings about Concord’s Main Street Project and the hoped for result, noting that it might look like a “...Paris Street scene...”

The other day after the flooding occurred, Main Street looked more like a canal in Venice - the only thing missing was a gondola gliding along.

Those of us who have questioned the realities of this major makeover do not take any delight or joy in the glitches and/or problems that are bound to happen during the life of the project. If you genuinely love the community and have a history with it, you also have a history with the hardworking and tireless merchants that have businesses on our Main Street. In my case, many have privately spoken to me as a result of my previous blogs, sharing their fears and frustrations and inability to properly say what they really feel.

One merchant commented, “We can’t go against it because there would be repercussions for us and we would appear to be not playing for the team...”

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog noting the hundreds of individuals - more than 90 percent of them from Concord - urging me to consider running for the office of mayor this fall. The response to that blog in the form of e-mails, phone calls and letters was overwhelming and humbling. Even people who live out of town but read Patch online, threatened to move to Concord simply so they could vote for me.

It’s gratifying in that it forces me to weigh the pros and cons seriously before making a decision. It also makes me recognize that nearly four years of writing blogs about Concord, whether in an historical context or in offering an opinion, has made some recognize my deep and abiding love for our city.

With each day I’ve been asking myself and asking those around me, what their opinion is since I would want to tackle any such venture with wholehearted enthusiasm and a desire to conduct a campaign that was not negative but that called attention to issues facing each and every one of us, whatever our political affiliation or belief. It is every one of us that goes into creating a community and what I hear more than anything is a feeling that many people do not feel they have a voice in what happens in Concord or that if they do speak, their feelings are more often than not disregarded. That frustration they feel is slowly but surely suffocating the energy and vitality that I have seen as a paramount piece of Concord for some 60 years.

Every voice counts and I cannot state enough how many times in my life I have listened to a differing opinion and as a result modified or changed some deeply seated notions I might have. You cannot afford to have a closed mind if you ever want to achieve any kind of progress. Yes you should have principals and things that you stand for but if you are unbending, you may miss that opportunity to make change that can impact upon so many.

I want to return a voice to the people of Concord. I want to make people feel as though their opinions matters and that they had more than ample opportunity to share in shaping an outcome.

I’m a realist and recognize the odds of my prevailing in such an election are certainly not overwhelmingly in my favor. However, a campaign built around the issues, demands for answers and an outcry for more transparency and involvement from the community could generate added interest and eradicate some measure of the voter apathy that has increased in recent years. If more people take note of a campaign and the issues and decide to go out to the polls - even if for no other reason than to make sure I don’t get elected, then something good would have come from this.

No doubt some would relish the opportunity to use me as a human piñata but to do nothing lessens the impact of the words and feelings and ideas I have written about for years. Can I continue to sit in the background carping and be taken seriously if I’m not willing to at least try?

At my age I am certainly not trying to jump start a new career path and if I lost there would be a few moments of disappointment, however I have gone through far worse things in my life and publicly. However, while I may come with a steamer trunk of “luggage,” I found that my frankness, honesty and willingness to accept blame for some often stupid and irrational mistakes borne of youth or inexperience, brought forth tens of thousands of letters, e-mails and phone calls thanking me for not sugarcoating a life, sometimes well lived.

Always there has been Concord - a place I returned to time and again. The city where I healed after having a knife held to my throat while being brutally attacked. A community that has forgiven me my mistakes and enthusiastically allowed me to find a welcome niche. How could I now not want to give back something of myself?