It feels all so familiar, as I sit here in the odd quiet that settles over a newsroom right before the polls close on Election Night.
It’s the lull before the storm, the windless eye of calm before the maelstrom of cut-ins and updates and concession speeches and pumped fists yet to come.
This year we wait for the voters to once again have their say, to elect a new Erie City Mayor, a new Erie County Executive, and reshuffle both City and County Councils.
Despite the problems, and there are many, there is an air of excitement, an unmistakable tingle that’s felt with the fresh breeze of change.
There will be new energy, new faces and with them, new hope that maybe the years to come will be better than those past.
It takes me back to a similar silence on a similar fall night in 2001.
The clean, fresh winds of change were blowing then, too. Two young Ricks, both full of new ideas and raw energy, stood ready to use the sheer force of their pending election victories to blast through the status quo.
I won’t spend a lot of time rehashing the old news of the last four years, except to say that it is obvious in hindsight that those energies burned brightly but oh-so-briefly, snuffed out by entrenched warfare, long standing slights and the sheer ponderous bulk of the effort it takes to run a government on a day-to-day basis.
Rick Filippi lost in the spring primary and wasn’t even on the ballot for Mayor this fall.
Rick Schenker announced months ago that he wouldn’t run again, admitting that the idea of running a county is a lot more fun than actually running it.
Now, it’s 2005, and in a few hours new visions will start down the same path paved every four years, people with that same new spark and the same desire to leave a legacy, to right the wrongs obvious to everyone except those currently in power.
I respect their willingness to try, to offer themselves publicly with heads clearly above the radar, confident that they are smart enough or fast enough or smooth enough to avoid the traps and trenches that have ensnared, entangled, and in some cases destroyed so many who have gone before.
Sitting here, taking in the quiet as the hurricane stirs on the horizon, I wish them well.