Rising Above Negativity

On Tuesday, Sept 16, 2008 GMA came to Niagara Falls as part of their "whistle stop" tour. They showed me why there is such a need for the group Niagara Rises... When Dianne Sawyer did her "tale of two cities" Niagara Falls, NY was shown in the light that it is. While I do not fault this, as I think that it is correct in that there is such a disparity between us and the other side, I did notice that her report about the occupancy in Canada made it seem like we weren't doing as well on the US side. I didn't see her go into any US Hotel and ask what their occupancy was that night. Had she, she would have received pretty close to the same answer. What they did do was show a full hotel on the Canadian side and then walk down Main street at 9 p.m. on our side. It wouldn't have mattered if they had done that at 2 in the afternoon, the buildings are still boarded up and vacant.
Why I mention this is because this is one of the things we need to fix, we will never be able to rise up and become a prosperous city again if we have a Main street that looks like a war zone. Great we have a new court house, but what else?
As a people we need to start being POSITIVE! What will we be 5 years from now? Do we want more closed businesses or can we rise above the petty politics that have hampered our city for too long?
Later Tuesday night we had a Niagara Rises meeting and everyone who saw the broadcast couldn't stop talking about it. We already have tourists telling other tourists to by-pass the US side for the Canadian, and now we had GMA doing the same. Will this be the bottom of the barrel, can we pull ourselves out? Maybe we can use this broadcast as the catalyst that is needed to jump start this city.