Over the past year, I’ve taken up the precarious mantle of being WXXI’s resident eclipse hater, something I consider somewhat of a necessary evil.
Make no mistake — my issue is not with the moon and sun itself, nor their intermingling. In fact, I think that’s pretty neat. I’m just not particularly excited, nor do I think it’s going to be nearly the revelatory experience some in this community have tried to convince me it will be. I’m sure it will be cool.
Rather, my issue is this banal call-to-arms of the economic development factions that permeate every corner of the greater Rochester area. Organizations whose eyes move in reptilian darts like a barfly at last call as the last stragglers stumble toward the door. It fills the air with a sour scent of desperation.
Look, I love Rochester, and I’m certain other mid-sized cities are led by governments and NGOs as dedicated to a perverse thirst for any kind of benign relevancy. Even more so, the attraction of quite literally any warm body, for any reason, so long as they have enough pocket change to clink together.
But it’s tiresome.
Whether it’s the PGA Championship or the Strong Museum expansion, this city, its media, its bigwigs, movers, and shakers bend over backwards to attract simply anyone to come here. What does the average Rochesterian get out of it? Really, nothing. Nothing will change for them. Nothing ever does.
Our tourism ethos could be marked by a road sign reading, “Welcome to Rochester: Visit When You Absolutely Have To.”
So for the months leading up to the path of totality, we must be inundated with information around an event that we will ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at for but a brief moment before we all collectively move on.
If I seem bitter, well, I am. I’ve attended meetings, engaged in exhausting conversations, and had to fake a smile like this shit wasn’t among the silliest exercises in futility I’ve ever witnessed. (The latter I became increasingly poor at doing.)
Make no mistake, I don’t buy that a half-million people are coming to Rochester to view the eclipse, as Monroe County forecasts, to begin with. Despite the sold-out hotel rooms around the region, I simply do not believe that the county population is going to nearly double for 3 minutes and 28 seconds of darkness. I think the potential impact is overblown.
When the sky goes dark, I’ll probably look up for a moment. Damn it, I’ll probably be wearing the goofy little glasses. God knows we have a military stockpile of them in this office building.
That will be the only point I will probably enjoy this whole eclipse fervor. The months of lead time has been a bleak recounting of a city groveling for any speck of notability. We can do better, and we should, but will we?
Give it some time. We’ll have another meeting about another spectacle and another chance to say, “Hey, we’re Rochester, and we exist!”
Gino Fanelli is an investigative reporter for WXXI News and a contributor to CITY.