Has Anyone Checked for Change in the Couch Cushions at the Otis Library?

I don't have a particular politics, especially when we're talking about my local zip code. When cornered, I will admit to being a Relentless Pragmatist. 

I think if you look at the correspondence between the Founders, the documents they used to create this nation through to The Federalist Papers, they weren't too keen on ivory tower concepts, preferring down-to-earth as they built this Republic. 

I don't think I'm alone in NOT seeing government, at any level, as either the solution to every problem or the obstacle to finding solutions.

I don't pretend to know if it's us or the times in which we live, but we (and I mean all of us across the country and not just here in The Rose City) suffer from selective memory while also lacking the capacity to forgive. 

Not even a year ago, we elected a substantially different City Council and Mayor than we had previously. One of the promises each of those elected had made while a candidate was to do what he/she felt best to advance Norwich economically, politically, emotionally, and socially. That promise is the critical component in making our government work.

I leave to your judgment what has happened, or not happened, beyond our City limits. I have just the right size brain to think locally, and so that's what I do. 

All of us have to believe those whom we elected to the City Council or the Board of Education will do the best they can for all of us, to the best of their ability, always (or at least more of the time than they won't). 

Many of us voted for the very people whom, in recent months, we've had less than kind thoughts and words about for their attempts to master economic (and other) challenges none of us could have possibly imagined. 

Too often we've become so partisan, even in much of what goes on in our State Capitol, that I wonder what's gotten into us. We're spectators, actually consumers, of political campaigns where a candidate decides 'for me to look good, my opponent needs to look bad,' and no issues of substance are ever debated or even mentioned. 

As awful as that is, in terms of tone and tenor of a campaign, it's even worse for us, those who must decide whom we support and choose a direction when so many others are leading us in circles.

This election, we are choosing a Governor, a Congressional representative, and populating a whole new statehouse, upper and lower chamber, as well as literally dozens of other offices and deciding local ballot initiatives. 

Photo by Norwich Bulletin

Here in Norwich, it will be a yes or no vote to bond 55 million dollars for a new police station downtown to replace one that's been inadequate for about the last thirty years. 

This is not the first time around the block on this initiative. Every eight to ten years we try to pass this referendum item, for usually ten million dollars more than the last time, and we never succeed (because 'it costs so much!'). But we all see the need for a new police station. Everyone wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. 

We just keep kicking the can down the road and hoping (maybe) that the Mayor will have a Powerball scratchoff ticket that pays for it all rather than bite the bullet and do what we know we should do. I fear we won't, and then we'll wonder why the next time the proposal comes up it costs more money. On this issue, for me the choice is simple, especially since I already know what happens when we do nothing. 

-bill kenny          

Stuck in My Head

Welcome to a quick demonstration of how I think, assuming you have any belief I actually think at all. And thank you for the extension of that kindness, or, if you have doubts but remain silent, for that courtesy as well. 

For the last few days, I've been thinking about a marvelous piece of nonsense by Edward Lear that I had to memorize as a child and willingly remember to this day. I know from experience that it will eventually go away, but not right away, unless I try to exorcise it, sort of. So here goes:

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea in a beautiful pea-green boat. 

They took some honey, and plenty of money 

Wrapped up in a five-pound note. 

The Owl looked up to the stars above, and sang to a small guitar, 

"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love, What a beautiful Pussy you are. 

You are, You are! What a beautiful Pussy you are!" 

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl, How charmingly sweet you sing! 

Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried: 

But what shall we do for a ring?"

They sailed away, for a year and a day, To the land where the bong-tree grows; and there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood, With a ring at the end of his nose.

His nose, His nose, With a ring at the end of his nose. 

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling Your ring?" 

Said the Piggy, "I will." So they took it away,

And were married next day by the Turkey who lives on the hill. 

They dined on mince and slices of quince, Which they ate with a runcible spoon; And hand in hand on the edge of the sand They danced by the light of the moon, The moon, The moon, They danced by the light of the moon." 

Subject to your briefing, that concludes my questions for now. 
-bill kenny

Relentlessly Cheerful

When I write about national politics, something is going on. Either I have become incredibly insightful, erudite, and educated on electoral dynamics and the psychology of the crowd.

I'll pause until the laughter subsides- in space they can't hear you scream, but in cyberspace I can hear you mock me- or we went from knee deep in the stupid to hip deep in the last decades. I'm thinking it's the latter. And you're hoping that's the worst of it but fearing it isn't.

We are slowly going broke, with the slowly part accelerating on a daily basis. We are so deeply in debt within a generation that all hope of finding our way out will be extinguished forever, and we will be a nation trapped in involuntary servitude to whoever holds our treasury notes (even if they're in a language we don't know how to read).

We have lost the war on drugs. We long ago lost the war on poverty, and from what I've read online, the war on literacy, while going splendidly, means soon we'll have no one who can report on its success, which is just as well, as we no longer have anyone to read about it.

And speaking of war, though we don't talk about it anymore, we were at war in Afghanistan for two decades without once ever explaining to ourselves what victory there would look like. 

Americans of all ages and both sexes in our armed forces there who aren't killed or wounded in combat or murdered by the very people they were told we are there to help came back so beaten and broken by what they'd seen and done they cannot ever be made whole, which is just as well because we can't afford to fix them. Luckily we have lots of street corners they can stand on with squeegees and rags. 

Having finally walked away from that car crash in Southwest Asia, we turned around and repeated all the mistakes we made in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Strait of Hormuz, trading desert sand for salt water devoid of shipments of oil and natural gas that the world needs to run. 

Since I mentioned helping and healing, let's not forget universal affordable health care, which many third-world nations, including the one ninety miles off the Florida coast already have, but we sure don't, and aren't you proud to be an American where you can die waving the flag (!) because you lack the money for a doctor or medicine to make you better.
 
And perhaps it's better that we die now since we've criminally underfunded and fleeced private sector pension plans, and anyone depending on Social Security will soon feel like George Armstrong Custer waitin' for the guys from the fort to get here.

It's the saddest part of Catch-22 where Yossarian tries to help his mortally wounded comrade and ends up dressing the wrong wound as Snowden freezes to death while bleeding out in the skies over Pianosa. We won't even have the luxury of a silk or golden parachute if we don't stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by chatter that doesn't matter. 

We've 77 days and a wake-up to Election Day in November. I'm tired of standing this fire watch by myself while the pyros take turns trying to put a match to everything we worked to build. And argue all you want, but we did build this.
-bill kenny

Over the Rooftop Sails Billy....

I love living in a society where everyone believes we should take turns (probably because, as a now-elderly white heterosexual man, I was born on third base and have spent my life thinking I hit a triple). 

As long as the entitled get to go first. I, too, believe the Lord helps those who help themselves, which is why He/She gave me two hands to grab it all and two pockets to put it away. But there's always someone with a better idea.

I'm wondering how much more we might get done if we began every meeting, from a town hall or city council session to a US Senate hearing, by trying the balloon trick. 

At the very least, we'd have an opportunity to meet someone both like and unlike ourselves. Of course, as Mae West pointed out, the danger with balloons is that it takes only one prick to ruin everything.
-bill kenny

O, No!

On my way into an office building the other day, I saw a sign on (what proved to be)  the only working elevator in the facility that read "OOC." I must have been raised by hermit crabs or something, since most of the stuff everyone else seems to know automatically I not only never knew but, upon learning react very badly in responding to. 

This elevator thing was both the former and the latter. I learned OOC, notice the caps, is "short for 'out of commission.'" Really? Actually, as I pointed out to the explainer, broken is short for 'out of commission'; I'm not sure what OOC actually is except stupid because of the second O.

My problem with the second O? Since when does 'of'' get its own letter? We are Living in the USA, not the USOA, which is what we should be if the elevator is OOC. Perhaps it's a 'good for the goose, good for the gander' rule, as SL could mean almost anything but we all know about SOL. And why isn't it SOOL since the o's are for 'out of'?

Do you remember "FYI"-for your information? Now it's been moved upscale and uptown to FYSA, for your situational awareness. Huge improvement, don't you think? I am not making that up-I got a note in the mail recently that began with a paragraph explaining FYSA with this doozie: BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front.

If the purpose of the acronym is to speed communications, but, in so doing, you must halt the conversational flow to explain your intellectual shorthand, what have you saved, and for whom? And is that always, or even more than sporadically, a good idea? 

It's not like we can buy anything with all this additional time, and I don't know where you can trade it in for vowels and consonants to make even more words to explain that cunning stunt (say that three times fast) you invented. But I'm willing to give it a go if you are, OIBiY. Oh, I Believe in Yesterday. Saved you a whole 2:05 right there. You're welcome.
-bill kenny  

Take a Number

These are dog days politically in Norwich this summer. So many of us are angry about so many things; it's truly a target-rich environment here in the Rose of New England. 

Our current top blood boiler (or close) is the ongoing operational and jurisdictional tug of war between/among four of the five volunteer fire companies in the Town Consolidated Districts, who, together with the paid fire department for the Consolidated City District, maintain our fire protection. 

The Jersey boy in me thinks it's a turf war, but that's probably an unkind oversimplification. Or not. Anyway. Everyone has lawyers, and who knows how long this will continue. But it makes for lively social media, trust me. 

The police are desperate to have a new, more up-to-date facility. They've been making do with a building that's been too small for the almost thirty-five years my family and I have lived here. The solution has always been, 'let's wait until economic times improve' before taking on a lot of added debt for construction. 

That mindset had voters reject a proposal for a thirty-million-dollar facility about a decade ago and then years later, a forty-million-dollar facility. Since it's never been built, the current price tag voters will look at this November for a new police station is now fifty-five million dollars. And still I encounter fellow residents who don't understand why the cost keeps rising.   

We have a possible massive expansion of our Grand List, which might help homeowners like me who have about 70% of the property tax burden right now, with an Amazon Fulfillment Center being sited in our still-has-that-new-industrial-park-smell-on-it in the Occum Industrial Park. There will be public hearings on this, since online chatter has been all over the map, with support and opposition reactions.    

All three of these issues have many aspects: economic, public safety, political (what isn't these days, right?), and rarely spoken but plainly visible, purely personal. We are a small town with lots of like-minded people to match, and we're happiest when we're unhappy. At this moment in the summer of our discontent, like it or not, we are delirious. 
-bill kenny

Picture This

Thanks to smartphones, everyone and anyone can be a photographer.
Not necessarily an Ansel Adams, or in my case, Gomez Addams, but we can dream, can't we?  

I admire great pictures. FULL DISCLOSURE: I consider any photograph I like 'great,' so there's a circular circulation thing going on there, and I have known some very talented photographers willing to be seen in public with me. 

But today, I wanted to share these images because they're breathtakingly beautiful.
-bill kenny