Summer is a time for travel. I had my bags packed for Aspen on a recent Saturday, when I stopped by New Bedford's gun safety exchange. Firearms Division Sgt. Troy Spirlet took me to the back of the city's Mobile Command Center, and we looked at the pile of rifles, shotguns and revolvers that had been collected in trade for pizza gift certificates that morning.

Our modest efforts took 45 guns off the street, and just as importantly, we reminded responsible gun owners of the importance of locking up weapons that might fall into the hands of young people or thieves. The program cost the city nearly nothing.

I felt good. For the first time we were sponsoring a gun safety exchange, not because someone had recently been murdered with a stolen handgun, but because New Bedford is finally making real progress toward becoming a safer city. In the first half of 2006, New Bedford had 16 shootings and three murders. In the first half of 2007, we have had 3 shootings and no fatalities. Perhaps we have been lucky, but a lot of hard work on the part of police and prosecutors has made that luck possible.

Later that same night, I arrived at the Aspen Summer Words festival featuring voices of the African literary renaissance. This is where I met Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina, who had just written the lead editorial in the July "Africa" issue of Vanity Fair, arguing that the habit of the Western press of painting the whole 53 countries of Africa with the broad brush strokes of a single giant crisis has become one of the biggest problems faced by progressive forces across the continent.

Africa's problems are daunting, Wainaina writes, yet "we have learned to ignore the shrill screams coming from the peddlers of hopelessness. We motor on faith and enterprise, on small steps. On hope, and not hysteria."

Together, the Kenyan writer and I looked out over Aspen, a mining boomtown turned ghost town when the silver standard played out, now reborn as a getaway destination for the wealthy. But for a handful of visionaries in the thin years of the last century, Aspen itself might have succumbed to terminal disrepair. The West is full of abandoned mining towns, the wind whistling through the empty panes of broken windows.

In New Bedford, we have the richest fishing port on the East Coast, and the most protected. We have on County Street lovely Victorian mansions nearly identical to one I saw on Main Street in Aspen offered for sale at $25 million. If we allowed ourselves to believe in ourselves, and made our harbor more attractive to pleasure boating, we might attract the crowds that make Newport, Rhode Island and Camden, Maine vibrant yachting centers.

But first we must challenge those who forever see New Bedford through a jaundiced eye. When a local reporter gets the national stage and tells the world he thought in coming to New Bedford, "Oh my God, I've come to the ends of the Earth," it baffles those of us who came here because we saw opportunity.

Ignoring New Bedford's problems ensures that nothing will improve. But it is also true that a sly cynicism, an acceptance of crime, grime and low educational achievement as a part of the political geography undermines the momentum of progress. New Bedford is a safer city today because of a new "can-do" attitude in public safety, after years of accepting the status quo.

I came to New Bedford from Burlington, Vermont, where I spent last weekend with family. On Sunday morning we walked the Church Street Marketplace, where a vibrant mélange of shops and restaurants have taken over the spaces where the old-line downtown retailers closed their doors, one after another.

In the middle of the once industrial waterfront, one of the busiest lumber ports in the world when New Bedford was a whaling port, we stopped at the municipal marina to watch the sailboats motor toward the breakwater and raise their sails. Then we stopped at a new lake shore aquarium, not nearly as elaborate as the one once proposed for our own waterfront, but thronging with visitors nonetheless. I noted a quote by Abraham Lincoln etched on a glass slab in front of the first fish tank: "I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him."

I returned to New Bedford to teach a summer success course to city youth.  Like the Gun Exchange, or Operation Clean Sweep, or AHA! Nights downtown, these are each small steps. But as a city, we seem to be headed in the right direction.

Nelson Hockert-Lotz

Positively New Bedford. 

Nelson Hockert-Lotz writes about things going on in the city that you’re not going to want to miss.

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