The “vision thing”
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008Oft used in American politics is the phrase “the shining city on the hill.”
As Ronald Reagan emphasized, “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.”
In his farewell address to the nation, Reagan expanded upon his romantic proclamation of cityhood and statehood and brotherhood: “I’ve spoken of the Shining City all my political life. …In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.’”
While the American rhetoric of the ‘shining city upon a hill’ seems, to the Candian ear, patriotically florid, perhaps a little bit of idealsim and civic patriotism might go a long way here.
Halifax you say? Thee of the navel-gazing cat by-laws and backyard chicken flutters?
Yes, Halifax. Where, like most places, there is an inferiority complex, lassitude, complacency, and good, old-fashioned, fear and loathing.
If ever there was a shining beacon upon a hill, dramatically introduced by the slap of a cold, great ocean upon a face, a face of rock, this is it – Halifax.
It is a hill with a city around it that looms out over the sea; peering at passing ships and greeting every Canadian ancestor that ever came from Europe. Almost all of us.
It is a city that you cannot even blow up by accident.
Back in 1917 the snow fell like white blankets around the wounded buildings whose remains stood skelatol and blackened, but still there. And the people still came and gathered, and fell around the twisted husks like the snow itself. Even the great Halifax explosion only inspired us to hang on.
And as silly and as ornamental as American political phrasing seems to us often times, we need not turn up our nose up at it or risk losing an important lesson — the lessons of our own stories, our own legacies, our own mythologies, and, yes, our own flushed and florid blarney.
As self-evident and filled with blatant trusims as pep talks often are, where, when we hear the truth we know it, and where we recognize that which we need to do better while also acknowledging the mettle of which we are made, we still need to hear it.
Halifax, itself, needs a pep talk.
The Citizens for Halifax Society ( www.citizensforhalifax.ca) spoke to me this week. Urban planner and caring visonary, Patricia Busby joined me on air to discuss the direction of Halifax and the whole notion of “the vision thing”.
According to Busby, we lack vision. We have, and I will paraphrase, “pothole Mayoral mentalities”. Which is a shame, because the potholes are so big around Halifax right now they could house entire shipments of stowaway Algerians. But instead of “cover your ass” career pothole politicians and councillors, we need people (Mayors, councillors, business leaders) who take the risks necessary inherent in leadership.
A case in point is Trade Centre CEO and Commonwealth Games bid leader Fred MacGillivray. He and his team got the bid for Canada, and especially for Halifax, and yet was, in my opinion, stabbed in the back.
But Fred MacGillivray’s disheartening battle should not discourage others (it was never about money, there were always ways around that issue arding to me; money was used as an excuse to steal thunder) – others who care and who need to lead.
When you lead, even in a democracy, you push people out of the way. People get offended. Noses get out of joint. How do you think the original pioneers did it? By pretty-pleasing everyone?
It is gumption and backbone that dug out the stumps and cleared the land. The notion of American and British exceptionalism (something from which we may re-learn) began, for America, in the late 15th century when America was no more than a gleam in Christopher Columbus’s eye.
In 1630, a wealthy attorney named John Winthrop took a group of fellow Puritans across the Atlantic to build a New Jurusalem in the New World. From the book of Matthew’s Sermon On The Mount, Winthrop characterized their new homeland and their new adventure as “a city upon a hill”.
Equally a blessing, equally an opportunity, Halifax has all the right ingredients.
Just add some heart and stir.
And don’t let the turkeys get you down (Reagan said that too).