Each year I write and record a speech titled, State of the County. It is filmed at the Arundel TV studio in Glen Burnie, and then spiced up with graphics and photos before a December release.
This year’s speech won’t be released until December 10, but my part is done. I wrote it over the past week, and delivered it to the camera Monday morning.
What that means is that much of my time leading up to Thanksgiving was spent thinking and writing about the state of the county, answering the big questions about whether county government is delivering for its residents.
After getting to the end of the first draft, I went back to the beginning. It lacked a cohesive theme. I wanted something that would capture the mood of the country and our county, but I didn’t want to say political things that would alienate a group of the people we serve.
So instead, I focused on the historical moment we’re in, a theme that historians may use in the future to describe this time both globally and nationally - the post-pandemic era.
In my revised introduction I ask whether we are recovering from the pandemic, from, “the isolation, the schoolchildren’s loss of social connection, supply-chain-driven inflation, trauma at the low end of the economic scale as wealth moved to the top, and the elevation of conspiracy theories into mainstream politics.”
I repeated disaster recovery expert, Dr. George Everly’s prescient words from our early pandemic virtual town hall, “Division delays recovery.” And then I wrote, “The world and our country have yet to heal from the impacts of the pandemic, largely because we remain victims of division. Victims, I say, because wedges were driven between us by forces outside our communities.”
Each listener will have their own beliefs about the source of those wedges, but most, I trust, will wish they didn’t exist.
And then I close the introduction with the bold statement that, “The daily work of delivering local government services, as mundane as it may seem, can and will heal us. It will heal us, and it will build the trust that we need both between our residents and their government institutions.”
I hope you share my optimism and commitment to “Healing Wounds and Building Trust,” as you gather with friends and family to give thanks tomorrow.
To a happy and healthy Thanksgiving.
Until next week …