A Hostage to Perception
By Albert B. Kelly
I’m forever skimming through magazine articles, newspapers,
and stuff online to get a sense of some the challenges that other communities face
and how they handle those challenges. Sometimes I come across new ideas and
strategies that I think might be helpful for our community here in Bridgeton.
In beginning the New Year and thinking about the challenges
and opportunities ahead in 2017, I came across an article entitled “What’s Left
Behind” by Kea Krause written for a magazine called “The Believer”.
In her piece, she was discussing the challenges faced by the
folks living and working in Butte, Montana. It seems that one of the main
defining features of that community is that it hosts the country’s largest body
of toxic water called the “Berkeley Pit”.
She describes it as a “massive hole filled with battery-acid
strength water” which seems about right considering that the pit is a former
open copper mine that measures in at roughly one mile long by a half mile wide
with a depth of almost 1,800 feet.
An economically depressed town with this massive superfund
site as backdrop, you can only imagine the challenges the community faced as
they went about the business of revitalization.
Naturally, I thought about Bridgeton and our challenges, but
the thing that caught my attention was something one of their officials said
about their communities’ reputation; “Butte’s been taken hostage by its own
perception of itself”.
The thought seemed to capture something that I think is at
least partially true of Bridgeton; maybe Bridgeton has been taken hostage by
its own perception of itself. The same could be said of any community or even a
region.
Perceptions are complicated things and the more subtle they
are, the more unchallenged they remain. Whether formed in response to the
opinion of visitors or measured against the way things used to be or by what
gets covered as news, these become the lens we see through. But they’re not the
only things.
In the piece, after mentioning how Butte has been taken
hostage by its own perception of itself, that same official said of her
community “we know that dialogue here is really healthy and that people are
engaged, because every issue has contention surrounding it, and it’s because
people are holding fast to something they love”.
Maybe that’s some of the same dynamic here in Bridgeton. While
there may be contention surrounding certain issues and challenges we face, it’s
because people are holding fast to something they love.
And perhaps that’s as it should be- the thread that runs
through everything, the point of common understanding, the thing we remind
ourselves of as we seek to improve our community and make it the best it can be
for our residents and visitors.
Sometimes it helps to think about the standards by which we
measure. If the standard is the Bridgeton our grandparents knew or the
Bridgeton of our distant memories- assuming we’re a little long in the tooth-
then we’re apt to be disappointed because we can’t go back.
But we can always move forward, despite the starts and
stops, and that means the freedom to make of things what we will.
At the very least, we’ll have the opportunity to try and do
new things and find creative solutions to meet our challenges. We have a lot of
work ahead in 2017, but it helps to know we’ve hit some high notes getting
here.
Whether it’s the work done in the park, having a college
presence in the form of a tech makerspace in downtown, getting a supermarket
presence back, preserving the Nail House and the 1816 Cumberland Bank portion
of the library, opening Sunset Lake, restoring Johnson Reeves Playground, or starting
Code Blue, these are things to build on.
It only happens because of groups and organizations like the
Bridgeton Area Chamber of Commerce, the Soroptamists of Cumberland County,
CHABA, the Cohanzick Zoological Society, and many others.
It happens because of the efforts of City Council, the
dedication of our staff and community volunteers, the energy of our youth, our
faith-based community, civic partners like Century Savings Bank, and the
generosity of organizations such as Pascale Sykes, the Pappas Foundation and
the Give Something Back Foundation, and numerous private donations.
There are many that time and space won’t allow me to mention,
but know you are valuable in our community. All of that is to say that there
are good things ahead in 2017.