Despite the huge turnout at the recent Global Warming conference at MIT, the weather has turned cold and the sky has grayed up. Thanksgiving has come and gone. Winter approaches. The full holiday scrum will soon be upon us. Malls throughout the land prepare with white lights and plastic trees.
Just before Thanksgiving, I was called up for jury duty. As I sat in a courtroom in the Edward J. Sullivan Courthouse in East Cambridge waiting to find out my fate, my mind kept wandering along two divergent strains of thought:
1. Of a more legal nature, and on a slightly elevated plane, I mused: Ours is a profound system that vests a 12-member jury of everyday ordinary citizens with the ultimate responsibility in determining the guilt or innocence of an accused. There is no special qualification or training for "jury member", just a willingness to sail as close to the wind of impartiality as possible.
The simple truth of the jury system makes it all the more moving: the full pressure and prestige of the government can be offset -- no, trumped -- by 12 ordinary citizens ... amazing and humbling.
2. Of a more parochial nature, I could not help but wonder: how is the new Middlesex County Clerk of Courts, Michael Sullivan, going to like his new job? He'll be taking over from his uncle Edward. Edward J. Sullivan has served as clerk for 48 years. In a system that handles 80,000 cases a year, can Michael be effective in both his elected roles -- as a Cambridge City Councillor and as the Clerk of Courts? It's a lot to ask, even for a man who answers all his emails on the same day.
I ran into Michael at the opening ceremony for the recent Trolley Square development, the newest addition to affordable housing in North Cambridge. The project, designed by the architectural firm Mostue Associates and developed by Homeowner's Rehab, is an improvement on upper Massachusetts Avenue.
At the event Cambridge City Manager Bob Healy waxed nostalgic. He remembered coming to the Trolley barn as a kid after school to meet his father, who drove the Mass. Avenue trolleys back when there still were tracks down the center of the street.
It was a poignant moment for a man who has served his city for a long time, and it made more clear that the old ethnic working-class neighborhoods that formed the backbone of this city for most of the last century are in many ways gone. They are being replaced by new economics and new faces.
For this new reality, the city needs new politics as well as a conversation about itself that explores not simply the past, but also explores the new realities that face and will face this city in the century to come. And if it's true that the working-class strongholds from the 1940s are fragmented beyond recognition, it is also true that the anti-establishment spirit of the 1960s is also sounding increasingly dated (which indeed it is). I was reminded of this when the Beatles' song "Day Tripper" came on the radio. It was a song that defined the cutting edge of what came to be known as the 1960s, but now its references have been overtaken by so much history, the song sounds antique. John Kennedy's 1960 Inaugural Address, in which he called for the "torch to be passed to a new generation", occurred almost 50 years ago! That torch has subsequently been passed on many times.
What we make of this reality will say much of what we make of our community. Our new politics needs to be progressive in spirit, but responsive in practice. It needs to speed up to keep pace with the maelstrom of the information age, but needs to save a place for people to move at their own pace. This has been one of the great tragedies of the marriage of information overload, hyper-interactivity, and our unbridled entrepreneurial beliefs ... we've forgotten about the individual in all her quirkiness and, well, individuality.
In city government, it is difficult to create a politics responsive to this challenge because of the overbearing role the City Manager plays in the operations of the city. Interactive politics is stifled by an administration that holds almost all of the keys. Nevertheless, a strong City Manager is no excuse.
As we come upon the new year, when it is tempting to reminisce about the year gone by, we must remind ourselves to look forward too, much like the Roman god Janus who stands at gates and doorways, looking both forward and backward. January gets its name from that god because it's an appropriate time for looking both ways. And while we're doing it, we might ask: what can we can do for our community?
