Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

End this failure of imagination and courage

WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, Vt. – My feet really hurt. So do other parts of my anatomy, including my brain.

I’ve been traveling around the Northeast all week by car, alternately staring out the window of a blessedly fuel-efficient hybrid car at our national network of interstate highways and walking until my shins throb through New York City, Providence, Boston and Hanover, N.H. 

Perhaps to those who inhabit those places on a regular basis, the signs of our current economic malaise are manifest. To me, coming from what Forbes magazine recently called one of America’s fastest-dying urban areas, each of the East Coast metropolitan areas looks like a new and shining Emerald City compared to Cleveland.

I’ve been thinking and writing about Cleveland’s failure to thrive for nearly 17 years now, both as a journalist and as an artist. Along with countless other Greater Cleveland citizens and civic leaders, I’ve hypothesized and analyzed and admonished and prescribed until I’m blue in the face and spirits. I’ve even started a business in hopes of changing both Cleveland and the world for the better. 

And still my adopted hometown continues to crumble and sink, in spite of many people’s nearly superhuman efforts to find or make solutions to its appalling problems. The trouble is, the Clevelanders with imagination and guts generally have little money or power. And most of the ones with money and influence have greed in place of vision and guts.

They care only about controlling their little patches of turf, about getting re-elected, about promoting their own enterprises, even at the expense of the public good. Politicians or philanthropists, tycoons or trustees, they’re all too busy protecting their personal empires to embrace bold ideas, make bold decisions and bring about big change. 

We get the leaders we deserve, right? Whether by ballot or by civic indifference. So Cleveland, I have to conclude, simply lacks the will to alter its doom. Depressed, dulled, fatalistic – whatever. We give up.

Can that be true? Are there really only a few fighters in this city willing to try something vividly new in spite of the political do-nothings and stick with the struggle until the new thing really happens? Do the rest of us have the courage to elect the kinds of leaders that have transformed Chicago and New York and Providence in recent years or decades and then support them? Can we say no to the cartel of old, traditional power-brokers in business and party politics and take control of our own welfare and future?

We can. And what we need first is to look around and see who we are – the individual citizens with the brains and heart to see a better future and to insist that we reach it. We need a summit.

All of us - employees, small-business owners, family people, artists, educators, entrepreneurs, laborers, union members, techies and scientists, office workers, retirees, even leaders dissatisfied with where the current leadership has dumped us – need to come together to meet and hear each other, choose a few ideas that will change Cleveland significantly and commit to making them happen. Starting now. Right now.

The lakefront? The educational system? The reuse or resale of foreclosed homes and the repair of infrastructure? Whatever you think must be done to turn Cleveland around right now, post your ideas in comments on this blog or send them to carolyn@geniocity.com.

Enough of aimless talk and shrugging defeatism. The wrong people have been charting our course. All of us need to revolt against this terminal inertia and spinelessness and despicable self-interest and save our city. Wake up. Stand up. Write in.