On display at the Jazz Fest: the real Rochester

It has been a blissful start to the Jazz Festival. The music is wonderful, the crowds are enormous and enthusiastic, and once we got past that brief storm on opening night, the weather has been perfect.

The first year of the festival, as we raced from one packed venue to another (Gibbs Street mobbed, lines waiting to get into late-night shows), there was the sense that maybe this region could get its act together and turn itself around. There was also the fear that like so many other things with promise, it would go away.

Apparently not.

This is the festival's sixth season, and the number of acts, the number of venues, and the size of the crowds has grown. On Saturday night, the seats at Max were taken long before the performances began, and late-comers lined the walls along the side and at the back. At High Fidelity, people were packed in like sardines. On Gibbs Street, the flow of pedestrians approaching Kilbourn and the Eastman Theatre was practically at a standstill. Thousands and thousands and thousands filled Chestnut Street to hear Los Lonely Boys.

This is what success looks like.

And it's what Rochester looks like at its best.

Saturday morning, the D&C's website had reported another inner-city shooting. And three knifings.

That, too, is what Rochester looks like.

And to far too many people, that image is the only reality of Rochester. Their hostility toward the city, its officials, and even its residents just crackles.

A few days before the Jazz Festival began, the D&C carried a letter from a suburban resident whose car, parked in the city, was the victim of a hit-and-run driver. She blamed the mayor. (I'm relieved to learn that no such things occur in the sylvan suburbs.)

During the same week, the D&C published an op-ed from another suburban resident, who insisted that one of the causes of crime in the city is that our yards are too small. City children don't have enough room to run and play, she insisted.

In one respect, these kinds of comments are too silly to mention. But they're a symptom of a serious division between Rochester and its suburbs. The lack of understanding about what the city is like, and the fear of anything associated with the city, makes it impossible for us to act as one community. And until we can do that, we won't solve our most crucial problems, all of which are community-wide problems.

Crime, poverty, education, tax base, employment, regional development: these are problems of the entire community. As long as we keep seeing walls between the city and its suburbs, we'll put our efforts into lobbing spitballs rather than building community.

This, by the way, is why it's worth having City Hall give a bucketload of money to the Jazz Festival. It's an investment in tourism and economic development and all that, sure. But it's also an investment in something that brings people downtown. Lots and lots and lots of people. And lots of them come from the suburbs.

The city's money is an investment in tearing down walls.

Speaking of fear...

The Republican candidates at last week's debate were one scary bunch. They may think the president has made a mess of the war in Iraq, but most of them have no problem at all with the war itself.

They want to continue a war that has cost a fortune in lives, in finances, and in international trust, and has made us, and a good bit of the world, less safe. And whoever is chosen as the candidate, it's clear that the Republican presidential campaign will be based on fear.

More frightening still: that's the very kind of campaign that has worked in the past.