Greetings!
I was dispatched as a teenager to what seemed a foreign land [New Hampshire] to attend prep school. Part of my adolescent attempt to make sense of an expanding world was to collect and take refuge in aphorisms or axioms or adages that contained nuggets of wisdom that could help me make sense of life's most confusing and conflicted passage. One of those witticisms that continues to reverberate for me I first learned in French, translated as "the more things change, the more they remain the same." I grouped it with "nothing new under the sun" [attributed to some Greek named Heraclitus],
When dissected, what the best of those maxims had in common was an appreciation of the complexities and paradoxes and rhythms of life. Because we are all trying to bring order out of life's messiness. How should I understand the mix of curiosity and caution in the face of the fawn that confronted me on my front lawn when my wife and I went for a late afternoon walk around the neighborhood yesterday? Her curious gaze met mine, though I knew she would bolt at any whiff of a threat.
A new city administration takes charge of Cleveland City Hall early tomorrow. The town has that deer's admixture of curiosity and caution. A new mayor has not elicited such excitement since Carl Stokes in 1967. Back then, it was mostly black people who were excited; the other half of town was more apprehensive. It is perhaps a mark of our progress that today's anticipation is more diverse, except perhaps within those institutional enclaves zealous to preserve their entrenched priorities.
Today's lead is an illuminating piece from Ryan Puente, the preternatural mastermind of the campaign team that helped deliver Justin Bibb to the steps of City Hall. We all hope the Bibb administration will bring us a dynamic team that will lead a long overdue revival and reimagining of our lumbering battleship of a city, refitting it to serve its citizens and its customers, and rebuilding our competitive chops so that we may regain viability and relevance amidst the constantly evolving complexities of this 21st century A.D.
Read Puente's riveting inside account of how Justin Bibb went from two percent name ID to the Red Room of City Hall in less than a year. Then check out this past week's collection of Political Cartoons and marvel at our magnificent world where an imagination can capture a portrait the life work of Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who died this week, and juxtapose it with the closed-minded reflex of one of the barbaric citizens in our midst.
Later this week we will talk about exciting changes in store for The Real Deal Press; our features are expanding, but we hope the quality remains the same. Or gets even better.
As always, thanks for reading! And please forgive today's prolixity. It's a first of the year thing.
R. T. Andrews
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