Adding Tears to the Waters of Babylon

Today marks the start of Holocaust Days of Remembrance 2026. Considering the unthinking brutality as a species we have visited upon one another since the dawn of time, and started to walk upright, you can be forgiven for wondering why commemorating the Shoah is only a week.

It was on this date in 1945 (Western) Allied troops, technically the US Army with (about) a Canadian brigade, liberated Buchenwald, the last of the Nazi death factories. As a child growing up, I'd heard whispers by the grown-ups, many who'd served in the wartime military, about the camps, never grasping the enormity of the horror.

While living in (West) Germany, I went to Bergen-Belsen (there was a huge NATO tank competition range near there at Fallingbostel) where, even decades after the horror, the early summer sky never seemed as blue overhead as it did on the landstrasse leading to Celle and where I never saw an insect of any kind or heard the song of any bird.

Science dictates they had to be there, in this place where Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died of typhus, two of the over one hundred thousand people who perished in captivity for the crime of being different. I felt foolish offering you a link on Anne Frank, as you know who she is, unless you don't, which then begs all logic for the establishment of a Holocaust Remembrance Week in the first place.

Intolerance and hatred of the other have a long history in the human race. Some have speculated that the first tool fashioned by the earliest man was a weapon to kill his neighbor. I'd suggest the Shoah marked the successful combining of primitive, superstitious, and mindless hatred with the unfeeling, uncaring, and antiseptic precision of the Industrial Revolution. 

In a perverse, and reverse, triumph, we had ourselves outmachined the machines in dispatching those unlike us with a uniformity and consistency never before seen in our history on this planet.

That it continues to happen, across our actually very small planet daily, in a variety of ways so numerous and subtle we often don't actually feel the hate, brings me to the brink of tears. To have come as far as we have-we, the self-anointed Crown of Creation, and still be able to stoop so low. 

To be so willing to harness the ingenuity and intelligence of millions of years of evolution and education in the service of the most venal and loathsome of all of our emotions is to stand naked before a world whose judgment we have chosen to disregard.

"There on the poplars, we hung our harps; for there our captors asked us for songs. Our tormentors demanded songs of joy. They said, 'Sing us one of the songs of Zion!' O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us. He who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks."
And thus begins the cycle again, perhaps never to end.
-bill kenny

Brute Force and Ignorance

These are strange days, indeed, except they've been strange for far longer than you or I may have realized. 

Ignorance is inevitable, but arrogance is preventable.
-bill kenny

Beware the Petty Pace

As a kid, I thought I could live forever (not sure what I thought I would look like when I was 'forever old,' but who worries about cosmetic details when you're eleven?) 

At almost-seventy-four, I now know better, and if I didn't, I have it in writing. 

One of the things that makes you feel older, I think, is when people you knew and worked with (in my case), almost half a century ago (let that sink in; it took me a minute, too), die. And in the last week, I had a double whammy.

Two former colleagues, one of them a very good friend and mentor, passed away within a day of one another. Rik helped organize my four-person bachelor party in Sachsenhausen (Frankfurt am Main) when GIs were less than welcome in many establishments. 

All of us were radio and TV weenies and wouldn't have known how to cause trouble, or a bar fight if you gave us the manual, but we spent a lot of time that evening staring at 'kein eintritt' signs and glaring bouncers. Rik relocated to Berlin, then in West Germany, and never left, becoming a trusted voice for millions of radio listeners over the decades.  

Dave was an amiable Texan with a honey in the rock voice and an easy-going personality. He wasn't the first Texan this kid from Joisey ever met, but he made quite the impression. There are expressions of his, almost five decades later, that I smile when I remember. 'Ugly enough to make a train run on a dirt road,' 'If it were a cooperhead, I'd be withering in pain,' and (of course) 'Dignity at all costs!' 

I don't know what happens when we die, but I do know that as long as we remember those who impacted our lives, they live on. 
-bill kenny  

America Needs a Mirror, Not a Wall

Before many/most of us in this nation were born, Hunter S. Thompson recognized the future of My Country, 'Tis of Thee, better than most of us would prefer.  

I don't know when we became these people, and more importantly, I don't know how to reverse it.
-bill kenny

Willie 'The Lion' Smith Approves

REO Speedwagon made themselves somewhat infamous for titling an album, 'You Can Tune a Piano but You Can't Tuna Fish' (somewhere Kevin Cronin weeps). The title made me smile, and overall, I thought it was a great album, but I was also a fan of the late Gary Richrath's guitar work.  

None of which has anything to do with this not exactly You Asked For It by Matthew Krantz.

Seriously. Can your sushi do that?
-bill kenny.

In a Government for Hire and a Combat Site

With the furies breathing down your neck.

You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.
-bill kenny 

I Love this Guy

And you should, too. 

Now, thus fortified, seize the day.
-bill kenny