Thornton Wilder placed the final act of Our Town in a graveyard. The play was a progression through the life of a small fictional town in New Hampshire. Rather than ending in a cemetery My Town begins near the burial grounds. If you come into My Town from the South, you will pass a field with gravestones dating back to the early 1800s. Some are weather worn to the point the names are illegible. Others are cracked and moss covered. There are many that are works of art. At different points in life I have enjoyed walking the roads that wind among the graves. As an introvert it’s a place I can walk and think and no one is going to talk to me. If someone does start talking to me there are more immediate questions, besides what I am thinking about, that need answered.
Troubling to me… This graveyard has come to be symbolic of My Town, at least in the minds of the citizenry. If you ask the average person about My Town they will tell you, “We are dying.” Ask any given teenager, “I can’t wait to get out of here.” Ask the elderly, “It’s not what it used to be.” My Town has its problems — maybe more than its fair share. It hurts my heart, that people only see the dark spots, they only see the problems. My twentieth class reunion is this year, and I found myself in a discussion with former classmates. Instead of planning or talking about how we might celebrate growth, they spent large swathes of discussion taking shots at My Town. Their focuses were the cliques, and rivalries from nearly a generation ago. In their eyes My Town is a waste of space at the epicenter of all that is wrong with the world. I left the discussion discouraged and disillusioned. Is this all My Town can hope for? Are we merely waiting for a sinkhole to open up and swallow us?
My county has a lot to be proud of, three astronauts, record setting athletes, historic ties to the Red Cross, numerous students that attended the finest Ivy League schools, veterans of every war since the Civil War, and in many ways we built America. Our limestone is found in beautiful buildings across the country. On the North end of my county you can see the quarry that produced the building blocks of the Empire State Building.
We are not a simple backwoods people forgotten as time has progressed. We have a future. We are more than what has been and we are greater than our problems. No person wants to be defined by their failings. When you show up late – once – you don’t want to be know as the person that is never on time. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I hope people remember me for the mistakes I have made.” If that person exists we assume they are struggling with depression, or some neuroses that affects their mental and emotional stability. Still in My Town, the people live in a perpetual state of despair. Most are convinced that we are nothing more than, addiction, pregnancy, and racism — forsaken by God.
As long as we only see our brokenness we will remain broken, trapped in a cycle of destructiveness.
Ronald Heifetz, Senior Lecturer in Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, said, “You don’t change by looking in the mirror; you change by encountering differences.”(1) If we keep responding to My Town in the same way we will continue to get the same results. It is imperative that we look for the bright spots; the people, moments, and accomplishments that need to be celebrated. Yes, there is a lot of construction that is inconvenient, but what does it mean for our future? A better infrastructure? A city that is more pleasant to look at and walk through? A community that is a little safer? It could be any number of reasons, we only need to pick one and celebrate that for the slightly brighter future it brings. The best things in life take time. They don’t happen over night they keep getting better when we celebrate the victories and avoid getting bogged down in the fits and starts of life.
Will seeing My Town in a new way and a better way be scary? Of course. We are people with a negativity bias, we will have to work hard to see the better tomorrow. We will have to wrestle with our fears and confront our demons, but it will be worth it. My Town will be better for it.
“To be sure, fear of differences can keep us resolutely committed to the status quo, to rejecting what seems foreign and to circling the wagons to keep out the intruder” (2) wrote, Tod Bolsinger. My town has endured the status quo. We have circled the wagons and shunned anything that looked like an advance because it seemed too costly or inconvenient. If we are to live on, if we are to be a community that our young people claim as their home, if we are going to rise above our frailties then we must stare our fears in the face, step over them, and look for the good that is on the horizon. We will need bravery to silence the objectors. My Town is not the sum of its problems.
My Town, somewhere along the way, lost its identity. We lost who we are and a vision for who we want to become. It is time for us to redefine and rediscover who we are as a community.
In the book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath write, “Cultivate a sense of identity and instill the growth mindset.” (3) This is one of the components in changing our current reality. If we are to see a hopeful future, My Town has to decide who it is. We have to find our places of pride and stop allowing our identity to be the things that are wrong. Our weaknesses need work but they are not who we are.
Our Town closes with a discourse from the Stage Manager,
“Most everybody’s asleep in Grover’s Corners. There are a few lights on: Shorty Hawkins, down at the depot, has just watched the Albany train go by. And at the livery stable somebody’s setting up late and talking. Yes, it’s clearing up. There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven’t settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk … or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain’s so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest. Hm . . . . Eleven o’clock in Grover’s Corners. You get a good rest, too. Good night.” (4)
My Town has mostly fallen asleep. Many are content to just let the train of life pass by, but there are some that strain on believing we can be better. The more of you that join us that believe and strain, the more likely our hope can become our reality.
My Town is beautiful. My Town is filled with wonderful people, though occasionally misguided. My Town has a rich history. My Town has a bright future.
1. Canoeing the Mountains, pg. 82, Tod Bolsinger
2. Canoeing the Mountains, pg. 82, Tod Bolsinger
3. Switch, pg. 259, Chip & Dan Heath
4. Our Town, pg.103, Thornton Wilder