If you think I sound mad about state’s problems, you are right

Connecticut is in a freefall, and not one gubernatorial candidate has proposed one compelling solution for it.

Much the same can be said regarding the findings of the CT Commission on Fiscal Stability and Economic Growth.

No matter how you slice it, all of these collective “solutions” equate to nothing more than failed, politically infeasible ideas from that past that are repackaged as new and force fed to our equally weak-willed legislators.

And more often than not, such “solutions” do not benefit those who most need help.

Business as usual will not suffice. Connecticut cannot afford to continue responding to its problems with its current strategies. Those strategies have led us to our present situation.

It is time. It is time to legislate in a way that brings parity to how we advocate.

It is time to double down – in an aggressive, innovative, effective, efficient way – on investments in value-added sectors in value-added locations: education, infrastructure, and redevelopment in Hartford, Bridgeport, Waterbury and New Haven.

It is time to think in new, uncomfortable, regional ways.

It is time to ease our grip on parochialism and NIMBYism. It is time we stay true to our liberal ideologies – and legislate based on them.

To everyone reading this I ask – when was the last time you drove around Waterbury or Hartford?

Not through — around? I know the potholes and traffic on I-84 are a nuisance to encounter from the interior of your luxury SUV — but I can assure you that burden comes nowhere close to the plight experienced by the jobless loiterers that spend day after day on Albany Avenue in Hartford.

It comes nowhere close to the constant fear and anxiety a single mother living in a questionably secure apartment surrounded by blight and decay in Waterbury feels day in and out.

We have failed. And we continue to fail. We rely on our cities to elect Democrats and then do not deliver on promises made to them.

We champion our state’s economic attributes — our defense contractors and our burgeoning technological and health care sectors, and yet so many of our students graduate from our public schools without the skills or resources needed to access those jobs.

We are leaving our own behind and it is shameful.

We spend tens of millions of dollars to build a minor league baseball stadium in Hartford but let blight and trash take over and make unsafe entire neighborhoods just two miles away.

If you think I sound mad, you are right. I am.

In a state that relies almost entirely on its proximity to New York to keep it above water, I say without remorse that I am embarrassed. We are capable of so much more and so much better.

John Bonetti is a Milford resident and Political Science graduate of Northeastern University in Boston.