A Gut Feeling and a Fun Fact

I feel that Memphis is going through a long and painful second birth.

I'd call it a rebirth, but that's kind of a boosterish term. It's too early to see or know what will happen.

Maybe it began in 1991, with the election of Mayor Herenton.

And maybe it's like the second birth of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Great people, the obvious possibility for democracy but with it the reality of corruption and crime and cronyism.

We're trying to figure it out, but most of our answers seem to come either from the past, or a present that is shaped so strongly by the past that we think it is unchanging. But it is as mutable as the past was disastrous.

So that leaves the future. But how in Hell do you get answers from the future?

Maybe by saying what we want to do and who we want to be, then reverse-engineering those dreams back to here.

But it's gotta be dreams -- no more press releases!

And now the Fun Fact: the Herenton Administration and modern Russia began on the same day -- January 1st, 1992.