Borne For Mayor 2017

How many of you responded to this call from the Policy Watchdog Group? I'm still thinking. And I'm starting to think feverishly. What the hell does Cleveland need? What would I do to it if I were mayor?

If I were mayor.... Hmmm. I was born in the City of Cleveland while Dennis Kucinich was in charge - a peculiar but significant horoscope indeed. Could I, in a few years' time, come back and be elected as Cleveland's Girl Mayor?

So, friends and neighbors, let's pretend. Let's pretend it's 2017 (I'll be 39 then, old enough to be wise but young enough to not start in with the indignant, tiresome "things aren't like what they used to be") and I'm kicking off the Borne for Mayor campaign.

Now let's have some lofty campaign promises:

As mayor of the City of Cleveland, I vow to:

1. Seek out those experts in progressive public education and let them run a huge experiment on the Cleveland Public School system. The system will become a trendsetter in modern urban education, and will be unlike any public school system in the history of public education
   
2. Assess what community groups are already out there doing good work and unite and work with them instead of recreating the wheel
   
3. Actually live in a different city neighborhood during each successive year of my tenure as mayor, while also retaining a centrally located house, which I would open up on a monthly basis to community members to enjoy a free, 100% organic dinner
   
4. Improve community health by instituting a ridiculously massive urban organic gardening program. I want to see heirloom eggplants growing out of the cracks in the sidewalk on Clark Avenue
5. Improve community health by creating car-free neighborhoods which are designed to encourage walking, biking, and using public transportation (which will also be massively improved)
6. Speak frankly and not tiptoe around the sensitive and explosive issues that divide us in Cleveland - namely race and class, but also the "us vs. them" mentality that divides the political left and right - and conduct a citywide campaign to encourage others to do the same (following the Conversation Cafe model)
   
7. Create scholarships and initiatives to encourage young Clevelanders to go out and explore what other places are doing right, and bring their new ideas back to Cleveland
   
8. Create a WPA-like entity for Cleveland that ensures jobs for all and contributes to community improvement projects
9. Ensure that Wal-Mart and other big box retailers do not decimate the city's small businesses by instituting an aggressive Shop Local campaign
10. Completely swarm Cleveland with so many progressive, optimistic-yet-entirely-practical visionaries that those who deride Cleveland as just a plum will be sent adrift, whining and wringing their newsprint stained little hands, on an ice sheet into the depths of Lake Erie in the dead of February.
    

Look, don't ask me how I'm going to finance these projects. I'm a 27 year old reference librarian who has no other experience doing anything except working in the natural foods business and slinging fancy espresso drinks. But let me use those four things that I am to my advantage, please:

1. I am a librarian, and librarians can find anything, including ways to finance insane civic projects.
2. I have twelve years left before I run for mayor, so I can use those twelve years to learn how to best fulfill my ten campaign promises (let's just hope there's not a whole other, much worse list of problems to fix by then)
   
3. I am a big believer that simply changing one's lifestyle to include constant healthy eating and exercise will take care of a whole host of other social ills - perhaps that's a hallmark of someone born under Dennis "Hot Water and Lemon" Kucinich's mayorship
4. Fancy espresso drinks are just part of life in Portland, and Portlanders seem to be doing just fine by their city. Perhaps there's civic gold in them thar lattes.....
   

You're Clevelanders, I know how you are, reactively naysaying is your favorite game. It's mine too. But I want to ditch that game somewhere out here on the sprawling wasteland of central Jersey - it's time for its battered old box to get squished by someone's H2 barreling too fast through the old Asbury traffic circle.

No one will miss it, and we're all better off playing more creative games, like Pretend.