MANCHESTER, Conn.
Connecticut's lawns are turning green again. Robins are scouring them for worms, which are returning to the surface despite the high taxes and accusations of racism above ground. Redwings are trilling madly over the ponds, brooks, and marshes.
Daffodils and crocuses are in bloom. Leaf buds on the trees are swelling. Many days are blessedly sunny and mild.
Kids are going back to school -- not that anyone ever will be able to tell from their test scores, but at least they're out of the house again. Virus epidemic restrictions are fading as people get vaccinated. Money for state government doesn't just grow on trees now; it rains down from the heavens as never before.
Indeed, in another month Connecticut, in its natural state, may become, as it does for a while every year, nearly the most beautiful place on Earth, just as it may be climatically the safest and most temperate.
Politically there will be as much to complain about as ever, but consider the alternatives.
Connecticut people wintering in Florida, many of them tax exiles, are planning to return north to escape the summer heat down there, as well as the alligators, Burmese pythons, lizards, and insects as big as pumpkins.
Texas, another state without an income tax that lately has drawn many people from Connecticut, was also without electricity and drinking water for much of February, and soon its heat and humidity may make its Northern transplants miss snow.
Tennessee, which also manages without an income tax, lately has been suffering floods and tornadoes on top of country music.
California, once the "golden state," has been impoverished by bad public policy and is being overwhelmed not just by taxes but also by poverty, homelessness, drugs, illegal immigration, and political correctness. State government there seems oblivious as many middle-class people depart or sign petitions to remove the governor.
Maybe the recent arrivals in Connecticut who hurriedly escaped New York can give their new neighbors some valuable reflections.
Of course no place is perfect, but nothing about geoe agraphy or climate stands in the way of Connecticut's regaining the advantages it had before it succumbed to the old corruption of prosperity -- the belief that prosperity is the natural order of things, not something that had to be earned and must be constantly re-earned. Whether Connecticut can restore its prosperity is entirely a political question, a question of whether its people retain enough civic virtue to discern and assert the public interest over the government class and other special interests.
If glorious spring in Connecticut cannot persuade people that such an undertaking is worthwhile, nothing can. Those who often threaten to leave but haven't left yet should take a bigger part in the struggle.
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WHERE'S THE RACISM?: Maybe the people who are accusing Connecticut's suburbs of being racist will explain how it is racist not to want to be stuck with a school system like Hartford's, whose chronic absenteeism rate among students approaches 50 percent.
It's not the fault of school administrators and teachers. The other day The Hartford Courant reported about the daily circuses being staged by city schools to entice students to show up. The circuses seem to be helping a little, but it is not cynical to ask: Where are the parents of the chronically absent kids? Are racists blockading their homes?
Is the exclusive zoning in many suburbs why so many city kids have been skipping school?
Zoning doesn't know anyone's race. Zoning does have a good idea of people's financial circumstances and the financial capacity of the town that enacted it, and it wonders: How does any town benefit from a large population of unparented and desperately disadvantaged children who run school performance way down and expense way up?
Complaints of "structural racism" don't answer that question. They distract from it and prevent any inquiry into why so many children have no parents and are so neglected.
If structural racism was really the problem in Connecticut, laws long in place would have solved it already. But structural poverty remains to be addressed, and, worse, remains even to be acknowledged.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
