Setting the tone in a community

Art can help pull the community together.

Courtesy photo

Can you imagine the following scenario?

You are cleaning your house, slowly making your way from room to room, when you stumble upon a stack of photographs, an album of pictures or your old high school yearbooks.

Yes, that is a nod to everyone back the next two weekends for McCook High School reunions over Heritage Days and McCook Community College homecoming the following weekend. Welcome back!

As you flip through picture after picture in the album or turn page after page in the yearbook, minutes slip by. Next thing you know, an hour has passed because you are flooded by the memories: some of them fresh, others forgotten until you held the photo in your hand.

As someone who still prints off copies of all my pictures, this happens on a regular basis. Hours slip by looking at photos of my kids when they were little, when I was little when my parents were little and cleaning goes by the wayside. At least that is my excuse for a messy house.

These days, getting lost in the memories can happen even easier as we have thousands of pictures at our fingertips on our phones.

Recently, I was purposely going through pictures on my phone, looking for images to be used by the McCook Creative District. We needed photos that reflect all the arts and culture already in place in our community, as well as those ideas that have the potential to help McCook become an arts destination. More information about this designation will be coming out over the next few months but visit mccookcreativedistrict.com to learn more about this unique opportunity for our community.

While flipping through the pictures on my phone, I came across a photograph from mid-2020 of the “We Are One” banners. McCook Community Foundation Fund and the McCook Arts Council had asked Deonne Hinz and Ginny Anderson to paint a mural on the sidewalk in front of Sehnert’s Bakery at the start of the pandemic.

The message of “We Are One,” along with the names of all the local businesses, was painted onto the sidewalk to remind everyone that we would get through the situation by working together, by supporting each other, by relying on one another.

To spread the message, the mural was imprinted on two giant banners and placed around the community over the next few months as the pandemic wore on. The banners are actually still used occasionally as colorful, flowering “fences” at local events and the mural remains mostly intact on the sidewalk, despite three years of heavy foot traffic.

At the time, the mural and its message set the tone for the community and helped create the environment we wanted to be a part of: that we are better off together than apart.

Today, we still have a choice to set the tone for our community and it is more important than ever to decide what tone we want in our community.

We can bemoan everything we lack, everything that is wrong, everything that “someone” should fix. But that puts the burden on everyone else and to put it bluntly, sets a very negative tone.

Alternatively, we can try to be positive and supportive of one another. We can celebrate the wins of others, big and small. We can ask ourselves what we can do to make our community better, how we can get involved, and how we can make a difference.

In the end, it is easier to moan and complain and do nothing.

But by taking a moment to consider what you want your community to look like five, 10, 20 years from now and then making a decision to make that happen, we can set the tone for our community…and hopefully, it is a good, positive, get-things-done tone.

And years later when you are flipping through your photos or reminiscing over your yearbook, you’ll look back and think: Those are good memories. We got things done. We made a difference. We made our community an even better place to call home.