Sarah Et Cetera

The New York Times picked up Larry Langford’s Olympic dreams: Mayor Pushes Skeptical Birmingham to Dream on an Olympic Scale. The third and fourth paragraphs about sum it up:

“Why shouldn’t Birmingham host the Olympics in 2020?” Mr. Langford, 60, asked in an interview at City Hall, smiling coyly and puffing a menthol cigarette.

With 230,000 people, Birmingham is far smaller than most of the cities that have played host to the Summer Olympics. It lacks sufficient hotel space, transportation options and athletic facilities, as the mayor concedes. And Atlanta, the last American city to host the Summer Games, in 1996, is only 145 miles away.

What strikes me in particular is how the article makes the idea more legitimate and more ludicrous all at the same time. Now that quite a few people outside the greater Birmingham area are reading about it, we sort of have to cop to it. We have to acknowledge, yes, our mayor thinks it’d be a good idea to have the Olympics here. As opposed to, you know, fixing any of the actual problems. And seeing it all set out like that, in inverted pyramid style, really drives home just what a batshit crazy idea it is. The headshot of Larry they have accompanying the article is nice, and he looks sharp, but they’ve obviously cropped out him waving one arm around crazily going, “Hey! Look over here! Hey!!”

Andre Natta made some very thoughtful remarks a couple months ago. Specifically, the difference between the dream and the reality:

The thing is, attempting to win the right to host a Summer Olympics would force the city of Birmingham and its leadership, elected and otherwise, to take a good hard look at the issues that face the city and the region and have significant progress made by a clear and absolute deadline.

He continues:

Mayor Langford’s proclamation while in attendance at the Alabama Sports Festival may have been “classic” Larry, however those around him will realize quickly that many of his ideas, if linked together under this umbrella, may actually get some traction, whether it’s a dome, new housing, new businesses, better transit, etc. So long as the improvements made to the city are done for the good of its citizens and not to be “as good as” any other large Southern metropolitan city, it could be the goal that finally makes us work for it. It also provides something for us to hold him accountable to and a bar to reach for when 2020 finally descends upon us.

And on a local level, that’s the heart of it. It’s big dreams, without action. The NYT even picks up on that, in their headline choice (although I don’t rule out the possibility that one of their copy editors is a smug jerk with a dark sense of humor). Birmingham is adolescent in that regard. We’ve got enough history that we have a bit of perspective and we can remember our past clearly enough to see how far we’ve come. Now we’re poised to change massively. And the prospect of that change is discomfiting, awkward and a little bit scary. But if we’re to progress at all, we need to just get in there and do it. To carry the teenager metaphor just a little too far, we need to stop outlining how great things are going to be in however many years in our diaries or our MySpace pages and get out there and live life.

In this case, we need leadership that will address infrastructure, crime, and growth. Fix the roads, fix the budget, fix the police department. Stop making productions out of big dreams– we all have them. Help us work together to make them reality.