Ever since Mayor Charlie Luken formed a blue-ribbon task force to address last April's riots and called it Cincinnati CAN (Community Action Now), the puns have proliferated.
Critics of the task force call it "Cincinnati CAN'T" and "Cincinnati WON'T." Mayoral candidate Courtis Fuller tried to gig his rival by weaving "Cincinnati will!" into his campaign rhetoric. Even CAN Co-Chair Tom Cody plays along, saying in this week's issue he "believes that Cincinnati will" (see Cincinnati Might).
CityBeat has certainly contributed to the pun parade, with this week's news story and other articles (see Tick... Tick... Tick...: Maybe Cincinnati CAN, But So Far It Hasn't issue of June 28-July 4, 2001). And then there was our own nine-point plan for fundamental change called "Cincinnati MUST" (see issue of Aug. 9-15, 2001).
The verb sparring is more than just semantics. It gets to the heart of our collective uneasiness about what happened in April and what's being done to address the root problems.
Sure, Cincinnati can. Most of us still believe Cincinnati can do just about anything we the people put our minds to -- like build huge new stadiums on the riverfront and maybe even fix up our decaying school system.
Cincinnati must? That's a little strong for the people who, nine months after April's riots, have stuck their heads back in the sand and pretend that everything's alright here. "We'll do what we can," I've heard many Cincinnatians say, "but there's nothing we have to do."
Cincinnati will? Well, that's the question to which no one has an answer.
So far the results of Cincinnati CAN are mixed at best. No one can dispute that lots of people are involved in lots of meetings geared toward good intentions and some specific tasks. And no one can dispute that, as results of last fall's city elections prove, CAN is about the only mechanism for change we're going to get.
So we need to make the best of CAN, don't we? Unfortunately, they sure make it hard for us to be anything but skeptical about this whole process.
Luken single-handedly forms the task force, appoints the three co-chairs and then washes his hands of its day-to-day operations; when questioned by a CityBeat reporter about CAN's lack of public meetings, he says he doesn't have anything to do with the panel's details. Yet he reappears suddenly in December to fire the Rev. Damon Lynch III as co-chair with a one-sentence message: "You are hereby dismissed from further involvement of any kind with Cincinnati Community Action Now."
A few weeks later, we find out that Lynch in fact continues to work on a CAN subcommittee. Is this not undermining all of CAN's good work and an affront to the Cincinnati Police Division, which were the reasons Luken gave for firing Lynch? How is this not "involvement of any kind?"
One of CAN's real accomplishments to date, supporters say, is the passage of Issue 5, which brings civil service reform to city government and allows the police and fire chiefs to be chosen from outside their departments. That initiative was well underway on city council before CAN ever got involved, making it feel like the task force tried to glom onto others' work to add a desperately needed notch in the "win" column.
Then there's the dozen or so protesters who wanted to meet with CAN members on Jan. 18 only to find the task force meeting moved to an undisclosed location (see Cincinnati Might). The entire CAN process similarly has been managed out of public sight and with little public input.
So here's an appointed panel that seems to have no public accountability and no authority to actually carry out any legislative changes it recommends. And here it is avoiding citizens protesting the firing of Lynch, who continues to work with the group that fired him. And here it is with no timetable, no sense of urgency and little to show so far for its efforts.
CAN has been held up as the tool that will help Cincinnati conquer fear, distrust and unfamiliarity, yet it often succumbs to fear, distrust and unfamiliarity itself.
Bureaucracies always seem to be more interested in the process of decision-making than in the actual decisions or actions themselves. And CAN certainly seems -- in deeds, not words -- to have been formed for the purpose of having meetings than for the purpose of bringing fundamental change to Cincinnati.
Prove us wrong. We need for you to prove us wrong. Help us add another pun to the lexicon: Cincinnati DID.
