Some of you might have recently read Mayor Wharton's "An Open Letter to Steve Forbes" that is making the rounds online. Within 3 minutes I got it in a couple of emails from members of our department at work. These are a few of the things that the people at MIFA that work on Something Good in Memphis had to say about it:
"Memphis is lucky to have Mayor Wharton. He is (among many, many other things) Something Good in Memphis!"
"Now this is how every Memphian should feel"
"Thank you, Mr. Mayor, for speaking the truth and speaking it eloquently.”
"One of the things that we should be proud of, is that we have a leader in Mayor Wharton that will stand up and speak up for our great city!"
I'm going to include an excerpt from the letter below, and I encourage you to read the whole thing (link). Memphis is not a miserable city, it is a great one, and we are glad to have a mayor that believes it and works to make it even more so. Nominated by the Something Good in Memphis team at MIFA.
Memphis is not a miserable city, not by any definition, not by any metric.
Memphis is a city of joy. You can hear it coming up from our high school gymnasiums and football fields every Friday evening. You can hear it rocking on Beale Street late every Saturday night. You can hear it in our churches every Sunday morning.
Memphis is a city of innovation. The accomplishments of our past are outshone only by the brilliance of what’s happening right now in our arts and business sectors. I’m sure at some point in your life you’ve enjoyed the music of Otis Redding or Al Green or B.B. King or Johnny Cash. Those artists and countless other achieved lasting, worldwide fame after getting started in Memphis. Brands like FedEx and AutoZone were born here and keep their world headquarters here; companies like International Paper and ServiceMaster have both relocated here in the past five years.
Memphis is a city of resilience. Floods, fire, pestilence, and poverty may have tested us, but they have never broken us. We are a city built on a bluff, positioned to withstand storms that other cities cannot. If the rates of unemployment, high school drop outs, and crime are to be our new battlegrounds, then we will join those fights, and we will prevail. For all of the problems you might show me, I can point to a legion of government agencies, non-profit organizations, churches, volunteer groups, and grassroots activists working together as one Memphis to find the solutions.
Maybe it’s something in our water. Maybe it’s something in our soil. I think it’s something in our souls that makes us Memphians. We know who we are – and miserable is not part of the definition.