Overlooked but Not Forgotten

Yesterday was Armed Forces Day, though you'd not have known it by reading most newspapers or news websites. Unlike almost every other national observance, it's not a big sales day at The Mall. 

We have Veterans Day in November, and later this month we'll observe Memorial Day (with lots of meat cooked over hot rocks and a five-hundred-mile left-turn-only oval road race), but Armed Forces Day is for anyone/everyone who ever wore the colors, past, present, and (the way the world is going), future.

We have huge numbers of highly-trained and well-motivated young men and women,  committed by my generation to military interventions around the world, whose successful outcomes I would pray for, if I prayed, though I cannot tell you what such outcomes would look like (the Stars and Stripes flying over the restored sculptures in the Bamiyan Valley? A Mets game in Mecca?).

The dangers in which we have placed our children and grandchildren have been guns and butter wars (and not quite wars to hear the President tell it), where real men and women suffer real losses while the rest of us watch our Chia pets grow on the kitchen windowsill.

In a half dozen or more locations around the globe, those in uniform have lost their lives in defense of the notions upon which we have built a nation. And for every one who died, close to a dozen have come home wounded either physically, psychologically, or spiritually (or all of the above). 

And we haven't been as eager to bind up those wounds as we were when we sent those who sustained them into the fray. When we see a veteran missing a limb, we discreetly avert our eyes because saying 'thank you' or asking 'how can I help you' would be too embarrassing (for us, not the wounded warrior).

I know, that's what we have the Department of Veterans Affairs for, right? Just continue to compartmentalize the carnage and how we help the survivors-it'll help you sleep, and that's what's important these days, being comfortably numb. 

-bill kenny

Don't Touch that Dial!

I work hard to stay up on current events, no matter how often the political news upsets me. In my defense, I will note that I don't have any of the 24/7 news screamers as 'favorites' on my remote (there's an oxymoron). I have to surf to find them, but I always do. 

I have a decent idea of the scale and scope of the weird scenes inside the gold mine we have going on here on the ant farm, though there are days I regret having given up drinking. 

What's disconcerting, as I do my hunter/gatherer thing with all the platforms for news and information at my command, is how surreal it is to see life being shared across the country/around the world as the new normal, while we hold hands for a summer season of seances.

News, with both our permission and tacit approval, has decided that if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck. We have local news kids breathlessly giving us exclusive looks at how the stars of national TV shows, which just happen to be on the same network, manage to get and keep those luxurious locks or how their breath stays so minty fresh. We always have more right after this. Seriously? Seriously.

A conversation with another of the Fifteen-Minutes-of-Fame celebrities we idolize (they're like panda bears; no actual use, and a bit less fur around the edges) is promoted before the spot break and leads the news segment when we come back. 

Meanwhile, that report on how your state's budget deficit will impact your local schools gets reduced to a wrap with B-roll just before the weather guy eats a bug as part of his "Perfect Weekend Weather Promise" promotion that the Suits in Corporate Just Love. 

Can you say Ka-ching? Of course you can, and you'd damn well better. And then we have the generation that gets its news from TikTok. The old man that I now am says, 'Heaven help us all.'

We've got our mouths to the soda and have long since stopped regarding news, in any form, as a window to the world. We've decided translucent instead of transparent is just fine, and no trouble at all. The world is a car crash, or perhaps it's duck soup (or even something in between), and we can find a cable news channel to reflect your beliefs rather than inform them.

Too many facts make my teeth hurt anyway, so get the bubble-headed bleach blond on the set (would it kill her to undo another button on that blouse?) and where's that Ken doll we hired to read those stories the ugly guys write? Did you see that Dimple? Network will scoop him up in a heartbeat.

Turns out we know less now than we did then. We consider it bliss, but we know what it really is. I've learned all about makeup tips for the beach season, but still don't understand anything about speculation on oil futures and its relationship to the price at the pump. If the batteries ever die in my remote, I'll be blind as well as deaf and dumb. Just like everyone else.

-bill kenny

There Ain't No Limit to What Money Can Do

Across Connecticut, towns and municipalities are practicing their ability to walk on eggs while holding their breath, knocking on wood, and keeping their fingers crossed (mine already are-you can tell by my typing). 

In Connecticut, despite the calendar, which starts in January and ends in December, the municipal fiscal year starts on 1 July--meanwhile, the Federal government starts its fiscal year on 1 October. You can't tell the budgets without a calendar.....get yer red hot calendars...

Cities and towns whose sole power to tax is restricted to property are busy measuring three (or more times) and cutting once all across the state, as many, like Norwich, have requirements to have an approved budget for the next fiscal year by a date rapidly approaching.

The only thing the two political parties can agree on when it comes ot budgeting is that the other folks are wrong, probably criminal, and possibly communist (or some combination of all of those).

We go through this around here, to varying degrees, every year. And every year we all get a case of the heebie-jeebies and vow to 'fix' this 'broken system' and then suffer amnesia when the crisis passes. As a matter of fact, since it's so familiar and recurs so often, I'm not sure if 'crisis' is even an appropriate word to describe it, but we generally muddle through with a stoic smile as if we were under siege.

Better a horrible end than horrors without end, I suppose, but this annual dance could end with very little effort, if we could all sit together and work it out. After all, money talks. And some days you can't get a word in edgewise.
-bill kenny

Endorsed by Jimmy Webb and the Fifth Dimension

You know the words and the tune. 

This is still from the music video. 

Bigly.
-bill kenny

See You in My Dreams

I've seen Bruce Springsteen more times than I can count, though once the Greedies took over concert ticket sales, I chose to make mortgage payments rather than buy nosebleed seats. By all accounts, he and the E Street Band are just as brilliant on their current tour as they are in my memory.

Maybe it's because we went to different high schools together or have grown up and/or old in tandem, but if I were to pick one "rocker" (not sure of the definition) I'd use to musically describe The Seasons of Man, it'd be Springsteen.

From the heroine of Blinded by the Light, 'she got down, but she never got tight-but she'll make it alright' to the near-prayer that closes Surprise, Surprise, "In the hollow of the evening, as you lay your head to rest. May the evening stars scatter a shining crown upon your breast. In the darkness of the morning, as the sky struggles to light, may the rising sun caress and bless your soul for all your life."

That I don't need to ever look up the lyrics, because they've been written into my soul, says maybe more about his ability to capture and convey an emotion than it does about me as a listener.

The brash kid on Greetings, 'when they said "Come Down, I threw up' to the world-weary adult, the husband, the father, the brother, and son of Working on a Dream, who penned a Eulogy to Danny to close out his words on that album, has been beaten in this life, but has never been broken.

He might shake his head at the wild-eyed optimist who 'pushed B-52, and bombed 'em with the blues' but knows, too, when he speaks to his father to come to bed on Independence Day, it is with our voice and is as much to ourselves as for ourselves.

We've gotten lost in a country Germans used to admiringly call "The Land of Unlimited Opportunities". Instead of seeing the promise of the sunrise, we see the inconvenience of the heat and worry about the loss of shade. What we once gave freely to one another, now some of us resent the taking, while others feel a sense of entitlement in the asking.

And if we don't want whatever edition of the American Dream each of us is working on to abruptly end, 'With a love so hard and filled with defeat; running for our lives at night on those backstreets,' we're going to have to redefine who we are, to ourselves and to one another.

Otherwise, "And in the quick of the night, they reach for their moment. And try to make an honest stand, but they wind up wounded, not even dead--Tonight in Jungleland."
bill kenny

Not Quite the Good Old Days

Don't know how your year is going, but the first five months of mine have been more than a bit unforgiving. Between long-ago friends shuffling off their mortal coils and straining to hang on to my own threads, it's been harder to be both in the moment and to savor it.

Hoping to hold the moments until they become memories, mine or someone else's.
-bill kenny

Cogito, Ergo Sum

Channeling Rene Descartes.

"I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am. I'm not your friend Or anything, damn. You think that you're the man. I think, therefore, I am."
-bill kenny