TURNABOUTS OF TIME: Why Godot Never Comes

We the people shouldn’t take much stock in the prophets of time. Especially Niagara Countians after the recent visit of Dennis Mullen, upstate chairman of Empire State Development Corporation. The Niagara Falls Reporter colorfully captured the essence of that “visit” as “Irish blarney.” According to the NFR, Chairman Blarney, oops I mean Mullen, prophesied that “it” would take “5 or 10 years before beleaguered residents of Niagara Falls could expect to see any sort of an economic turnaround.”

Let me say that surely it takes an insurmountable arrogance, or possibly, a smug certainty with respect to the ignorance of local residents, to make such a preposterous statement. What enables such agents of apodicticity to make these infuriating claims is a kind of mythology of time. Time cures everything or causes everything, of course, in enough time.

The duration of a decade seems to assure the locus of a meaningful epoch. 100 days is a just measure of the successful “beginning” of an American presidency. A few more or less days of school seems to some to make all the difference in academic achievement. And if it doesn’t, add or subtract another day, week, month or year. What exactly is this magic of abstract time? Well, there isn’t any magic though it seems to be a useful delusion, an acceptable form of justifiable delay, expectation, anticipation or even relief from frustration.

But back to Chairman Blarney. Note that he sucks us into the universal psychology of the perennial program of postponement. If we don’t know how to do or explain something just postpone its expectation from whenever to later to sometime. Christianity, or as I prefer to call it, Christianism, postpones heaven and salvation until after death. Troop postponements in Iraq for 2-3 more years. Success in Afghanistan….God knows. But Mullen naturally uses the appropriate procrastinating grammar when he says “it” would take 5 or 10 years to see economic progress. But what is the “it” that it would take. Does he tell us? No, because it will take time, just time and seemingly only time. And of course this blathering latter-day bureaucratic idiot doesn’t know and undoubtedly doesn’t care. He’s simply a delivery boy of bad news from the big bureaucrats in Albany. He is another layer of alienation separating the people from real and effective political self-representation in Western New York.

So time is progress. And progress? “It” takes time. But what we need to know is the content of that “it” and the content of all the “its” that didn’t happen when these same promises were made several times before in the criminally disappointing history of governmental pseudo-concern for and feigned interest in the well-being of Western New York.

Here, then, we have another round in the stultifying edification process in which Western New Yorkers have not yet learned to no longer trust our local professional politicians, state bureaucrats and political party strategists and ideologues.

Change for the Falls and the region requires a radically autochthonous effort of a new order of thinking. Just don’t let anyone tell you it will probably take time. Time can’t do it. Only we can.