Community Connection-Nobody Puts Baby in the Corner

O.K., I admit it -- I am a die-hard Dirty Dancing fan. The movie, that is, and I'd like to say that it's because it's about a young girl who finds her own path and stands up for the underdog. Yeah, yeah, but it doesn't hurt that in 1987 Patrick Swayze was hot. I still crank it up in time to hear him say "Nobody puts Baby in the corner." Oh, my.

Movies often become favorites due to a line or a speech and I've seen some so many times I just watch something else until it's time for that part to come on. My kids grew absolutely sick of The Sound of Music and I still know the words to almost every song. Recently, on YouTube, I realized I could search for my favs and there they were! Goodness, I relived the whole "You can't handle the truth!" speech (A Few Good Men); "This ain't Dodge City and you sure ain't Bill Hicock" (Quigley Down Under); "Here, hit this!"(Steel Magnolias);"We will not go quietly into the night, we will not give up without a fight, today is our Independence Day!" (Independence Day); on and on.

One speech that always gives me pause is from The American President. Michael Douglas says "America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You've gotta want it bad cause it's gonna put up a fight." Boy, is he right about that.

The great majority of us know no other system than the one which provides us the freedom to express our opinions about virtually everything just about any time, any place, and to any one. We analyze, criticize and ridicule. We mimic, mock and boo. We also applaud, cheer, pray and shout and we do it all openly, publicly, and most importantly, freely.

We not only love this freedom, we thrive on it - until the person next to us wants to express his or her opinion just as vehemently, and oh my gosh, those opinions are different from ours! What the heck? Suddenly we're off, sometimes before we even know we're there.

Recognizing another person's right to have a viewpoint different than ours is often difficult for us. We want to be RIGHT!!! On a community level, we can just wind up being evil, mean, wicked, bad and nasty. And when that happens all things good grind to a halt.

So what do we do? There was great, open discussion about various things at the Ward 1 meeting and we need more of that. We need people to ask questions until they get answers. Those answers need to be definitive, precise and truthful. We have great expectations of our leaders; we also need to have great expectations of ourselves. We need to decide what kind of community we want to have and then we must make the commitment to do whatever it takes to make that happen.

And like Miss Frances "Baby" Houseman, when we show that we are willing to stand up for ourselves we can say to the world "Nobody puts Kennett in the corner!"