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" There are going to be two misconceptions thrown about in celebration of the life of Tom Menino, the former mayor of Boston who passed away today at 71. The first is that his ascension to power was some kind of fluke, and his continuation in Boston, some kind of accident. The second is that Menino was a kind of throwback among America&amp;#039;s mayors -- straight from the wards, no political ambitions beyond City Hall, not in any conceivable way glib, and not very good on television at all, an old school, index-card, machine politician in a data-driven, hyper-atomized, computer age. Neither of these is true. We will deal with the second one so as to understand why the first one is so remarkably wrong. Menino was a puzzlement only to those delicate souls who mistake syntax for intelligence. He became mayor just as Boston was emerging from the very last vestiges of its parochial past -- insular neighborhoods which did not welcome outsiders, which might simply mean someone who moved there from another parish in Dorchester. It was Tom Menino who navigated his city through the end of a process that showed its most poisonous fangs during the busing crisis in 1974, and which ground steadily on thereafter. Menino eased the way. He made Boston a welcoming place, perhaps the first time in the city&amp;#039;s history, dating back to when they were hanging Quakers on the Common, that such a thing could be said unequivocally. People came to Boston from college and stayed. Artists flocked to loft space. The gay community increased both its visibility and its political and cultural influence, culminating in the Goodridge decision that legalized marriage equality. Menino oversaw this cultural earthquake with dignity, and with aplomb. &amp;quot;Visionaries,&amp;quot; he once famously observed, &amp;quot;do not get things done.&amp;quot; But he was a visionary in his own way. His vision was a melding of a modern city that still had distinct neighborhoods, but neighborhoods in which anyone was welcome to live and to work and to rise the way he had from Hyde Park. He made Boston interesting because he made it a more interesting place for more interesting people to live. Let the signs in Vietnamese along Dot. Ave, the Haitian students at UMass Boston, the Dominicans who came out to Fenway in droves to cheer Pedro, and Manny, and Big Papi, and the old-line Irish who kept faith with their own immigrant grandparents and stuck around, and watched their kids play Little League or CYO with the children of these new Bostonians, let all of that be the monument for Tom Menino, who loved his city and let it love him back. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30575/rip-tom-menino/>