What’s in store for Everett?
By Josh Resnek
With 2023 just starting off next week, a new year is about to take over where things left off in 2022.
All we know for sure is that one year has ended and another will have begun by next week.
It is impossible to write history or even to predict it as history can’t truly be recorded until the events themselves unfold and we can look and see exactly what went on, what were the results and how the future was impacted by the events that passed.
Years are difficult to explain in their entirety except to say that when one year passes and another year arrives, well, it is time to take stock for a moment or two.
After all, the past is sometimes interesting to look into and to dissect. Shakespeare says it best about the past – “the past is prologue.”
What does Shakespeare mean with this bit from his play, “The Tempest”?
Everything that has taken place in 2022 is a preparation for the opportunities to come in 2023.
In other words, history sets the context for the present.
2022 was, in the immortal words of the late great Charles Dickens, “… the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
What will 2023 bring to Everett?
That’s hard to say with any authority.
We know this for certain, 2023 will be very much like 2022, a continuation of sorts with a great deal of history repeating itself, as the great philosopher Emanuel Kant said so wisely.
Kant believed that history repeats itself.
Many others believe that all of history is idiosyncratic.
What does this mean?
That all of history, each event, down to its day and time, are different.
When you attend a city council meeting at city hall in 2023, it won’t be much different from attending a city council hearing in Everett city hall in 2022.
Most of the faces are the same. Most of the issues are the same. Most of the allegiances are the same. Most of the outcomes of political efforts are the same.
Yet every meeting in 2023 bears not much of a relationship to meetings held in 2022 except that they are familiar and similar.
Whether you like it not, there is a great deal of continuity to life in this city.
Not much changes from year to year.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-2021 did in fact change the world.
The pandemic shut down life here as never before.
That was then.
This is now.
2023 will bring increasing inflation despite best efforts to tamp it down by the Federal Reserve Board raising interest rates.
In the post pandemic world, the new wave of inflation we are being made to endure follows us wherever we go and no matter what we do.
Iceberg lettuce was $4.00 a head at Stop and Shop Monday morning. A half dozen things picked up at the market was $50.00.
A full shopping cart of food is close to $400. Inflation affects everything about our lives. The cost for apartments, condos and multi-family dwellings as well as single family homes puts home ownership out of reach for most working people in Everett.
This will continue to be a highlight of 2023.
Prices may recede just a bit because interest rates are rising so high.
For the most part, everything will remain largely the same.
The building boom will continue unabated throughout the city.
With nowhere to go but upward, building projects will grow in mass and height.
Old Everett, that is, the old folks who have spent their lives here are moving out or dying off.
Organic Everett is now about people of color and ethnicity with 84% of the kids in the public schools Brown, Black and Hispanic, and almost 70% of the people living here non-white, and many non English speaking residents.
Bottom line, in 2023, the game, or the circus, however you choose to look at life here, will go on.
Progress is the name of the game. Equity isn’t.
Out with 2022.
In with 2023.
As a well known writer put it, “2022 could have been worse.”
Indeed.