Welcome

Kevin P. Gaughan: Founder, A Canal Conversation

Another founding father, John Adams, once said that while we cannot guarantee success, we can deserve it. And in this age in which we live, one of open and inclusive governance that aspires to serve an increasingly diverse American people, we deserve success by working together – across those social, economic, racial, geographic, and yes, ideological boundaries that purport to divide and diminish us. And I believe that we deserve success as well by taking part in discussions like the one we commence together here tonight.

As we open this conversation, we do well to acknowledge that our voices will carry to other times, and our obligations flow to specific yesterdays and countless tomorrows. To those who came before, women and men who gave their labor and lives to create the canal – human and engineering feat of unparalleled courage – we owe our best efforts to honor and sustain their achievement.

And to those who follow us, not just in the coming years or decades, but as well Western New Yorkers of future centuries yearning to touch and understand from whence they came, we owe our vigilance and care, not only to sustain something of our past that will speak to their future, but as well to add gifts of this generation worthy of them and posterity.

Cicero observed that to have no knowledge of anything that happened before you were born is to ever remain a child. And it was Goethe who told us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, “stay, thou art so fair.”

So, tonight, our hearts feel that if we fail to honor that past, a part of us dies. But our heads know that if we refuse to embrace the future, we cease to live. Somewhere in between those two truths lies wisdom. And finding that reasoned course is the challenge that beckons us here tonight.

Eloquent and compelling women and men are about to assist us in that search, and in so doing, speak the language of their craft: “sense of place,” “fusing history with contemporary design,” “land use economies,” and “heritage tourism.” They all share the artist’s gift of speaking that which we can only feel. But if you listen with care, you’ll discover that theirs is in truth the language of healing, of restoration of the sense of larger self and higher purpose to which we all aspired when we first grasped the essence of humanity.

Each of us is here, then, in support of our community, in pursuit of better futures, and somehow, in search of ourselves. And I submit to you that our cause is noble, our abilities great, and our interests common and united.

From Homer’s Odysseus, through Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, to Steven Spielberg’s ET, the journey of life is, in the final analysis, the story of our efforts to reach shore, to rest assured, to return home. And with your presence here this evening, you bear witness to our city and region’s re-dedication to this essential task: to find our way back, as individuals and communities, to a more sustainable, enriching, and prosperous society. These efforts consume time and energy, and require respectful patience. But I believe they’re worth our while.

To those who say that government functions – from the prosaics of waterfront development to the imperative of social justice – must be discharged quickly rather than wisely, I say your horizon is too near and your aim too low.

When I think of the assertion that only instant gratifications have value, I think of the story of the 18TH century French marshal who loved his garden so. One day he told his gardener that he wished to plant a particular type of tree. The gardener objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for one hundred years. “In that case,” the marshal replied, “there’s no time to lose. Let’s plant it this afternoon.”

In that spirit, no matter how long it takes and how much we must give, there’s not time to lose. Let us begin cooperating tonight.

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