11/11

Today, Veterans Day, is a holiday, but it is NOT Memorial Day; we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present. 

When I was a kid, today was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of "the war," which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War II. There was always a moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

We are a nation again at war (and have been, it seems, for most of my seventy-four years on earth). We have every shade and flavor of service personnel serving in places across the globe, some so remote I fear the people who sent them there don't know where they are. Because they are out of sight shouldn't mean they are out of mind. 

Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day and allowing all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault we endure.

It's a new world and a new way of war, but those making the sacrifice are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those in places marked with dots on maps of countries we cannot name, but all those who whet the blade of the sword they wield in our name and in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

Find a moment today to think about all who have served and resolve to do better and be better as a resident, neighbor, and citizen. We can use the help, believe me.

We are more filled with self-doubt as a nation than at any time perhaps in our history. Now is the time for courage and steadfastness, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now, or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say-as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude, we will always be worthy of their sacrifice.

-bill kenny

Gig Economy, Anyone?

My first job was as a parking lot attendant/part-time lifeguard in the summer at Sandy Beach, at Harvey's Lake, Pennsylvania.  I tell myself I went on to bigger and better things after that, and maybe I did, but it was fun, and I had some spending money. It certainly wasn't a career, and I never looked far enough down the road to ever consider it that way.

I settled in more ways than one, I suppose, but I have a good life, personally and professionally. I look at Millennials, and whatever we call those who've come after them, and feel for them, as they are better educated than my generation and earn far less than I did when I was part of the workforce. I found this online description: "Millennials make a living through a mix of traditional corporate jobs, specialized technical or financial careers, freelance work, and digital side hustles."

Perhaps if we offered people an opportunity to earn a living wage, they'd take us up on it, and we'd see that legendary rising tide of prosperity lift more boats than is currently the case.<SIGH>

But if you are seeking a side hustle, I may have found just the thing for you.

CHURCHOFGNOME.ORG

Perhaps we can carpool to work?

I call shotgun.
-bill kenny

We Live in the Most Dangerous of Times

If the Shoah, the Holocaust, was an unfinished symphony of genocidal annihilation for Europe's Jews (and it was only unfinished because the rest of the world finally wrested control of the killing factories from the True Believers before they achieved their Endlosung), then on this day, eighty-eight years ago, the first notes of the overture in that murderous symphony, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), were played.

When you look at the pictures of death and destruction, and listen to the softly told tales of survival, often by the purest of coincidences, if you have a heart, it is sickened and if you have a conscience, it is outraged. But to keep the next exercise of extreme intolerance from ever reaching this point, we all need to retain the memories of the events as well as the circumstances that allowed the events to happen.

The Nazis did NOT leap out of bed eighty-eight years ago this morning and cause the German nation, the land of Luther, Schiller, Liszt and Beethoven, to lose its collective mind and soul. For decades leading up to this day, and not just in Germany, but all across Europe, East and West, the systemic and systematic marginalization of Jews, apartheid before that word was in fashion, was in practice and a part of everyday life. The Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935 helped dull all Germans to the slaughter to come.

The ability to use language in reducing those who are the object of your animus to something somehow less human than yourself so that the acrimony and injury inflicted upon them has no more consequence than stepping on a bug is a critical tool in the creation and construction of the crematoria and concentration camps and no less vital to that than the jackboots and the armbands.

Find the time to go online or to your local library and invest an hour into researching the decay and depravity that began with Kristallnacht is asking a lot, I know. So how about a deal? What if you and I promise one another to take an additional breath before using a racial epithet to characterize someone on the other side of the political spectrum with whom we disagree? 

Or to refrain from suggesting (at the top of our lungs) what a person with whom we are arguing may attempt to do with her/his logic and conclusion, as anatomically difficult as it might prove to be.

Instead of counting to ten, we try to count to eleven, then twelve, and then just keep counting until the gorge in our veins recedes just a bit and our blood has gone off its boiling point. And, most importantly, when we see someone else in mid-screed, we mitigate and mediate to help assure a more rapid return to civil and civic discourse in our interactions with one another.

Germany was not a nation of Nazis on Kristallnacht. Many believe they were in the minority even when in power. It isn't just the sins committed on this day eighty-eight years ago that should live in infamy forever, but, rather, the sins that could have been prevented had two or more people joined and raised their voices in opposition. We must never forget the lesson of what happened next.
-bill kenny

A Belated Sunday Riddle

I started writing this daily back in October of 2007.
A lot has changed since then, and a lot hasn't.  

I got off to a delayed start today because, despite having written 6.975 previous entries, I forgot to write one for today until now. Sorry, your luck has run out, I guess.

Anyway. Here's the riddle: What's the difference between a rut and a grave?
The depth of the habit. Ouch.
-bill kenny

Doing the Banana Slide

My doctors are insistent that I need more potassium and have repeatedly pushed me to make bananas a regular part of my diet. I am not the world's biggest fan of bananas, and to my embarrassment, I don't have a good reason why I don't especially enjoy them.  

The Banana Splits? Loved 'em. Plain old bananas, not so much. 

I believe I could be persuaded to reconsider my position if I lived in Montana and rode shotgun with Steve Braithwaite. Hell, even Chiquita might reconsider.
-bill kenny

Grandma Checks

When we were young children, Mom's mom used to write us checks for birthdays snd holidays. My memory is that they were for five dollars. My Dad would take them to the bank and deposit them (and none of us ever thought about the money again). 

I thought about those checks Wednesday when my health insurance company sent me one to settle a lab charge from my kidney treatment facility, whose lab is NOT part of their network (which means the insurance company pays for nothing, sticking me with the charge). The reimbursement drill happens every other month because that's how often a battery of blood tests is done, and since I'm still above ground, I assume I passed. 

The lab bills the insurance company over three thousand dollars for the tests. The insurance company tells me I owe the lab one hundred and eighteen dollars and sends me a check for three dollars and seventy-one cents. The lab costs are separate and distinct from the renal support treatments, which are billed at over three thousand dollars a day and reimbursed at five hundred dollars a day. 

I have no idea how any of these sums and amounts are arrived at. What I do have is a better appreciation of health insurance since I'm positive I would be dead by now if I had to pay for all of these costs myself. Only occasionally do I wonder how the twenty-eight million-plus Americans without health insurance manage to stay alive.  

I should have paid more attention to those Grandma checks at the time because in my retirement years I sure could use them. To say nothing of having a Grandma.
-bill kenny  

Signs and Portents

In the warmth of the post-Election glow, if I may inject a short infusion of pragmatism: with all the billions spent on campaign literature, signs, advertising, and campaign events, how is it that there's never enough money budgeted by anyone's campaign to pay for the pick-up and clean-up of lawn signs in the days after they burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away?

Tale of two days near where I live in Norwich: a major intersection of two highways where traditionally, on the Monday before the election, candidates and their supporters cluster and hold up their campaign's lawn signs as commuting motorists whiz by in, and towards, every direction as the lawn signs are waved and horns get honked (or vice versa, for all I know). 

Join me now on that same corner, same time of the afternoon-but yesterday when all the laughter has turned to sorrow. The only thing out there was a few lawn signs as opposed to the forest in the days previous. Meanwhile, the other lawn signs, the ones in front of houses that neighbors are surrendering because they can't afford to stay and have no place to go to, will wave in any breeze at anyone.....

-bill kenny