Greg Peck: Say something positive about Janesville
PrintI left the office last evening just in time to chat a few minutes during a City Hall social and then catch City Manager Mark Freitag's first State of the City address.
Freitag began by mentioning he wrote a letter we published late last month in The Gazette. It urged residents to resolve to be positive. “Identify one good thing about our community every day and share it with someone.”
With that, he urged each of us listening Thursday night to think about something positive about Janesville, then turn to the person seated next to us and share it. I was in a row with Bob and Ruth Fay, majors overseeing the Salvation Army. I told them Janesville is blessed to have a relatively low crime rate. Ruth mentioned resiliency and how neighbors in Janesville take care of each other.
We were having a nice discussion about those ideas, and the room had gotten quite noisy, when Freitag returned to his speech. He noted how the chatter demonstrated how easy it is to be positive and enthusiastic about Janesville.
“It's hard for me to be a negative person, so it really brings me down a step when things are negative,” he told us.
Our website is rife with readers ready to pounce with negative comments on most any subject. So how about it? Share something positive about Janesville here today.
Greg Peck can be reached at (608) 755-8278 or [email protected]. Or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.