Mother's Day

I figure everyone with a pulse, or an approximation, is waxing poetic today in honor of Mother's Day, as well we should. My mom wrangled six of us to adulthood, the last three for a significant distance without her partner of (at that time) nearly thirty years.

She, Franz, and Anni Schubert, Sigrid's parents, got along wonderfully well the only time they ever met long ago, even though they shared not a single syllable of a common language. Sigrid's mom was a Rubble Woman upon whose back the Federal Republic of Germany became the economic engine of Europe in the decade after World War II. Anni's husband passed decades before she did. The two women took no shit from anybody and raised children who are the same way.

My sisters, Evan, Kara, and Jill, are accomplished, masterful, and successful. They take care of their own families with the same devotion and the same discipline (no feet on tables, no glasses without coasters) as their mother did. Glenn, Russ (both now deceased), and Joe were fortunate to have them in their lives and smart enough to know it.

My two brothers, Kelly and Adam, and I are married to women, Linda, Margaret, and Sigrid, whose Moms raised them to give their husbands the confidence to go out into the world and try to reinvent it in our own image. When we come home at the end of each day, sometimes defeated but always undaunted, they convince us we can begin again on the morrow because of their love and support. 

This year has special significance in our house, as Michelle, our daughter, and her husband, Kyle, are awaiting the birth of their first child later this summer (Oma and Opa are pretty psyched about all this, as you can imagine). 

Enough syrupy sweet sentiments, before you think I've gone soft, I'm invoking the deathless words of Ray Wylie Hubbard to close. Love ya, Mom(s), all of you.

-bill kenny

Make the World Better Today

With FedEx, UPS, DHL, and dozens of gig-worker-driven delivery systems, we forget sometimes about the service Benjamin Franklin established, the United States Postal Service, or, as most of us call it, the Post Office.

Postal workers have long been the butt of jokes, subject to derision, suspicion, and all manner of indignities as they make their rounds, but today they are doing more than delivering mail; they need all of our help.

Stamp Out Hunger, going on today, is a nationwide outreach in support of local food pantries that are under more stress from more patrons than at any time in their existence.  

You will not only make a difference, but you'll be the difference.
Please, help stamp out hunger.
-bill kenny
 

Two Is Too Few

If you're like me, you have a pretty high threshold for pain. Sounds like a good thing until I concede (in my case), I'm talking about other people's pain. I can be surprisingly stoic when we talk about how 'somebody needs to take one for the team' right up until I get in the batter's box and beanballs start whizzing around my head.  Then my ardor and interest in jungle rules whiffleball cools noticeably.

We have the same aversion to pain when the calendar rolls around, as it has again, to municipal budget time, since it is our wallets absorbing the pain. Our motto  becomes 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable.'

You remember the City Manager's proposal, department hearings, and public hearings? All opportunities to deploy pronouns like "us" and "we." Instead, and as always, 'them' and 'they' wound up as culprits for everything in that document no one likes, including the type font. ("A little too Bodoni Bold for my taste," I heard no one at all say.)

Our language reflects our perspective. Even though the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look, down here on terra firma, we can elevate differences and distinctions to an art form when it suits our purposes. 

"Those people" in City Hall have no idea what "we" are going through. Maybe you didn't say that, ever, but I know I have. It's not important who says or thinks it, but rather, how it colors how we act after we do.

Every year, we have the same tug of war for finite public dollars among those of us who want more for education, public safety, employee recruiting and retention, infrastructure, capital improvements, and economic development. When "we" wonder what "they" were thinking of, something close to the reason we formed government is getting badly lost in the noise and language.

Someone tells me s/he is 'for education.' Of course you are, what's the alternative, ignorance? Don't forget that all of "us" support enhanced public safety, but do you seriously believe there is anyone who doesn't? When we define which ones are inside, we are also creating an outside. 

What we mean by what we say is where we tend to disagree. Maslow's hierarchy of needs helps us articulate and prioritize our desires and wants as well as our abilities and capabilities of satisfying them. Here's the Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious (BGO): 'they' are 'us.' It is only together, me and you that can become 'we' and 'we' need all of 'us' all the time.
-bill kenny

Not About the Strait of Hormuz

Getting gas the other evening, I watched a guy with a double-axle pickup truck rail against 'those greedy b'tards' for what he's paying for (I'm assuming) is diesel or high-test. I've never owned a fuel pig, so I don't know what you feed them.

I do know the bed of that truck was so clean you could eat off it, because I looked, which tells me his health insurance doesn't pay for penile enhancement surgery, which is why he bought The Beast in the first place. Pays to advertise.

When I last shopped for a car, I spent more time wondering about the leather seating than I did on the hydrocarbon emissions. Because I'm a bad person? I don't know; are you? Not really, we're just a little mutton-headed and set in our ways. Leather trim, I understand, but breathing air I can't see....not so much.

Look at our coasts, north and south, or east and west. All this offshore drilling, and the press for even more, who is that for? Us or U.S., you choose. If we were being honest with one another (but we lie as often as we blink and in the blink of an eye commit atrocities against one another), we'd eliminate nozzles at gas pumps and replace them with heavy-gauge syringes so we could just mainline the oil, diesel, kerosene, and gasoline, because our appetite for 'the ooze' is practically insatiable.

It's not as public decoration that those platforms and rigs ring around the coastlines or those derricks raping the landscape hammer into the earth in search of fossil fuel. It's cold, hard commerce, my brother and sister, coin of the realm. If it didn't pay, it wouldn't happen. 

It's okay because we tell ourselves we could kick the petrol habit at any time; assuming, of course, we all wake up tomorrow morning and are Amish. How do you bake bread anyway? Yes, I'm mocking them-it's not like they're surfing the Internet and will read this. And if they did, what's going to happen? Are they going to build a barn in my backyard? Don't get your shawl in a bunch, I'm kidding.

But I'm not about this: We all "would prefer" wind, solar, and other alternative energy, unless it costs more than what we're paying now or involves changing (in any way) how we would prefer to live. If it does, well, sorry about the seagulls, those tarballs, and fracking for natural gas and benzene in your drinking water. It is really too bad about those coastal animals in the marshlands who were destroyed, but (what's that expression I love, oh yeah) you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

So don't worry about the price of gasoline because we're oblivious to its true cost-until the next time we have to send 18 and 19-year-old kids halfway around the world to sit on the lid of some third or fourth-world country whose sole value to the Bastion of Democracy is they have oil. If you look really hard in the mirror you already know what we are-it's all down to agreeing on a price. And picking out who has to pay it.
-bill kenny

Dick the Butcher May Have Had a Point

Our son and his wife have a greater appreciation for Homeowner Associations and the importance of retaining an attorney than I hope I will ever need to have. Is it just me, or is so much of our daily lives somehow entangled with the legal system?

"I'll see you in court," has become the new "Have a Nice Day," and no one (except me) seems to notice or care. 

My youngest brother is a member of the New Jersey judiciary, having spent the earlier part of his life toiling in various aspects of the law as an attorney. I fear more than one of these "7 Truly Bizarre Things People Have Sued Over" sounds horribly familiar.    

Maybe just me, but I think Naruto should have hired one of those lawyers we see on television to file an appeal.
-bill kenny

¡Que tengas un feliz Cinco de Mayo!

Across the USA today, many of our friends and neighbors will celebrate Cinco de Mayo even though many can speak no more Spanish than is used at Chipotle or Taco Bell.

For a lot of us, today is a good reason for a party, and we certainly don't need a second invitation to do that. Except for parts of the American Upper Midwest, the weather should be conducive for frivolity and debauchery (assuming the weather needs to be even remotely pleasant for those of us who will 'observe the holiday').

Battle of Puebla, May 5, 1862

It's too bad we north of the border of Mexico don't have a better grasp of our own and our neighbor's history to more fully appreciate the significance of a holiday on calendars other than our own.

-bill kenny

Ruth Is Stranger than Bridget

In the course of the last decade or more, as hyperventilation and hyperbole joined forces to pass judgment on everything from elementary education through politics at every level of government to life in these occasionally United States, I would, in rare moments, needle drop on Alex Jones' fever dream, Infowars. 

For a long time, all I thought he had was a website, and then, through a former colleague (whom I barely knew when we were stationed in Germany (separate locations)), I found he had a YouTube channel. And as horrified as I was to make that discovery, there are many YouTube channels even more bizarre than Jones'. 

Talk about a waste of technology. His stuff was lunatic fringe for the longest time, and somehow (I never understood how) joined at the crazy with QAnon, which (by itself) put the  "F" in "WTF." That otherwise sane people, almost all only white men, swallowed his bunkum, confounds me, but never really involved me until he weighed in on the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, insisting it was all fake. 

I cannot imagine the pain of losing a child, much less having a loudmouth lout insist that none of what you were experiencing was real, that you and your deceased child were crisis actors. Decency should have dictated that Jones stop, but decency is a lost value, and it took a long, arduous legal battle to shut him down, and bankruptcy to shut him up.

Proving God's sense of irony is alive and well, The Onion successfully bid to acquire Infowars' assets (though, thankfully, not its head a$$hole), though there's still some legal fandangoing yet to happen, which is why all that is available right now is this brilliant send-up of the usual tripe Infowars was notorious for. Enjoy.
-bill kenny