CARLTON FLETCHER: Maybe we could use a little glass-half-full

Tell me something good …

— Rufus

There are a number of initiatives going on in and around Albany that, essentially, deal with the city’s self-image.

Albany State University associate professor Veronica Adams-Cooper introduced the Dougherty County Commission to the AMPP Up the Good Life economic development initiative at that group’s meeting Monday morning, telling commissioners the initiative’s goal is to “celebrate the strengths and positives of the community.”

“So long, we in our community have operated on the basis that our glass is half-empty,” Adams-Cooper said. “We want to operate on a glass-is-half-full premise.”

The program is similar to one element of an initiative being undertaken by the Albany-Dougherty Economic Development Commission, through the Atlanta-based Lattimer Communications public relations agency. Lattimer personnel have conducted interviews with focus groups made up of citizens from throughout Albany and Dougherty County in an effort to determine the community’s strengths and weaknesses.

An initial report from Lattimer indicates that the city has a severe self-image problem, an idea that the EDC’s Barbara Rivera Holmes has long endorsed. In a much earlier conversation, Holmes told me, “It’s hard for us as a community to convince outsiders to look at us positively when we have such a negative image of ourselves.”

And while it stretches along the fringes of the absurd to think that a society as advanced as ours needs someone to point out something so obvious — even more so when you include in the equation the fact that good money is being paid to people to tell us what Holmes, for one, has been saying for years — maybe there’s something to this call for an image makeover after all.

What community but one with a severe self-image problem would subject itself to the negativism that permeates this place we call home? What city that offers as much — in services, in recreation and entertainment opportunities, in natural resources — to its citizens is subjected to more criticism by its population than this one we call Good Life?

We all know Albany is no land of rainbows, unicorns and chickens in every pot. And we know there is plenty of local corruption to go around at all levels of government and industry. We also know we have problems with our school system, in finding jobs and in training a qualified work force.

But what city doesn’t in this age of economic uncertainty?

Certainly by making public note of the city’s real inequities, citizens put their elected and appointed leaders on notice as to what improvements are expected. That’s the public’s job.

But, damn, I’ve never seen a population that can’t wait to point out the perceived negative in every facet of their community, whether it’s a good thing or a bad one. And, sadly, they do it with an equal mix of venom and glee. When it comes to raining on someone’s parade, nobody can top the people of Albany, Georgia.

Let someone here find a cure for a heretofore incurable disease, and within the hour there would be local social media posts condemning the discoverer for depriving so many in the medical profession of their livelihood … and claiming that the scientific breakthrough is no more than a hoax perpetrated to boost health care costs in the region … and that the powers that be will use the cure only to help blacks or whites — depending on the race of the person posting — because that’s the way things are done here.

An announcement of a large company bringing hundreds of high-paying jobs to the community would be met with complaints that the company is getting too many tax breaks, that the company’s CEO is a bad person because he contributes to this or that organization and is a member of this or that church, and that the highest-paying jobs would all go to blacks or whites … depending again, of course, on the race of the person posting.

I’ve always looked at these self-image initiatives as ineffective and of little consequence, as putting too much emphasis on the obvious. After thinking about it, though, maybe I’ve been hasty in my condemnation. After witnessing the verbal wrath unleashed by some in the community when logic would dictate that celebration and/or praise would be more in order, maybe a good old dose of glass-half-full wouldn’t be such a bad thing after all.

Email Metro Editor Carlton Fletcher at [email protected].