A few New Year's wishes
by Jack Neely
This time of year it's dark and cold when it's not even suppertime yet. Downtown the holidays come in hacking coughs, frenetic parties with lengthening silences between. People go home early. A commuter still in his darkening office with a window overlooking ancient Market Square can feel like the last man in the world.
Down on the square, a man with a leafblower attached to his arm like a long appendage is blowing dead leaves. There aren't many of them, but progress is slow. The wind is blowing some of them back, and the eddies of his own breeze send some of them off in contrary directions. He could rake them all into a tarpaulin and be done with it, but he prefers to herd them, like sheep, with his loud right arm. From this distance he appears to be standing in the same place for a long time as his leaves shift patterns before him.
There's a lot of wind, and a lot that hangs in the balance in the cold air. A man who's been mayor since the Internet was unknown, since family cars were small, since Saddam Hussein was the hearty friend of the Republican, has completed his notable career here. In his 16 years, the longest administration in Knoxville history, he has accomplished several notable and worthy things, and some useless and costly things. He has started several enormous projects that have to be finished, whether we agreed with the original decisions or not.
In the next few weeks and months we will learn much about his successor, and how he will resolve scores of stories we've been following in this paper for the last dozen years. But there's a great deal we don't know yet.
This solstice the whole town seems to be hung in a sort of municipal interregnum. We're at an awkward spot where we may advance and astonish ourselves, or slip backward and remain forever the town pronounced with a nasal sneer, where most adults don't care to vote for mayor, which even its promoters feel obliged to introduce to skeptical newcomers with the condescending prefix, for a city its size.... Knoxville has been, to many, chiefly a density of Interstate exits, a jumble of chain stores with acres of free parking, a place of cheap real estate, low taxes, and handy cable hookups. It has been, to others, a city: a place where strangers meet and ideas clash and art blooms and there are surprises around the corner. Of the two, that Knoxville is the more provocative one.
Knoxville has begun a shift of some sort, in directions that seem almost progressive. They are, at least, interesting. Fate's big leafblowers might blow us right back again. But before they do, here are some year-end wishes for my hometown. All of them are sincere, and some of them are practical.
 That we start work on a Gay Street cineplex, employing the well-suited facade of the S&W. Quick, before someone else realizes how profitable it will be to build a cineplex somewhere else within five miles of the largest university in the region.
That we keep our promiscuous assortment of hot and cold grudges—they're a large part of what makes us Knoxvillian—but that we not ever let them prevent us from supporting worthy efforts.
That we learn that with cherished property rights comes something equally grown-up, property responsibilities. That the minority of Knoxvillians who own historic property know they still have property rights: the right to take care of the place, and when that gets to be too much, the right to sell it to somebody who will.
That we learn what our ancestors knew, that there's nothing wrong with walking a little bit. That walking a couple of blocks from an available parking space is fundamentally better than insisting that good buildings be leveled. That a walking habit alone would give downtown retail a boost and solve a variety of expensive municipal problems, as well as some problems of the circulatory system. That if we started walking more, we could solve our downtown parking problem, save some worthy buildings, and put a dent in the TennCare debt, too.
That we quit renaming streets. And that we quit renaming streets for live people whose careers aren't even over yet, and who may have a bad season or two and be less beloved than they perhaps may be today.
That Knox County pass an ordinance holding vehicles to some maximum standard of toxic exhaust. That it won't take one more listing in America's top-10 most toxic cities to get us talking about it. That if we don't pass such an ordinance we will have the courage to admit that we are, as citizens, pigs.
That Knoxvillians, America's most private citizens, will come out of their houses and lakehouses and churches and country clubs just a little more often, and mix with the rest of us. That Knoxville become a place lively enough to induce them to come out without evoking a sense of obligation.
That it become obvious even in the minds of the most cynical passerby and the most sedentary suburbanite, that Knoxville is, in spite of everything, worth the trouble.
December 25, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 52
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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