Repeat as Needed

I offered this last year as the Memorial Day weekend began and people wished one another 'a happy weekend,' ignoring the solemnity of the occasion. Yeah, I can be a horse's behind on things like this.

Maybe just me, but I think sometimes on Memorial Day weekend, we get a little lost with the mattress sales and such. This is from quite  a few years ago and was called:

 

Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War

I couldn't find a picture of a barbecue grill with a rack of ribs and some burgers, so this will have to do, I guess.

Memorial Day 2026.

-bill kenny

Shouting in a Movie Theater

It's been an intense, if not productive, spring here in The Rose City (a/k/a Norwich, Connecticut) as we make our way towards a final, approved municipal operating budget for the fiscal year starting 1 July. 

If we could focus on that, I'd be happy, but we have distractions like the ongoing and very heated dispute between some, part, or all of our volunteer fire companies and the Chief of the City of Norwich Fire Department and the City Manager. 

Everyone has an opinion, and like noses, they all smell. Mine? I live in the Consolidated City District and am protected by the paid fire department. I've not made a study of fire-fighting, but I'd be willing to bet that the average (or even above average) home fire doesn't care a fart to a pfenning who extinguishes it. Ditto for the homeowner. 

My concern is that we allow these 'issues' fanned into blazes by one or more self-serving alderpersons on our City Council because they enjoy and benefit from the acrimony and aggravation that are the results of their actions, to cause us to lose focus on the core functions of, and reasons for, government, at whatever level you'd like to take this discussion. 

Despite the machinations on Wall Street, here on Main Street, times, as seemingly always, are tough. We have more will than wallet, and maybe that's where we should concentrate and let the side shows take a break for a moment. 

Many Norwich homeowners across the city (present company included; my property taxes have gone up 45% in the eight years we own our home) feel they are at the end of their financial rope and insist the City Council hold the financial line, whatever that is being defined as on any particular day, with 'not one more cent' anywhere in the budget.

We're a funny lot, we really are (though it's probably hard to see the humor right now through the pain). We prefer problems that are familiar (and the more general the description of the problem, the better) rather than solutions or ideas that are not. 

I have changed a lot in the nearly thirty-five years since I nad my family arrived here from Germany. And so has where I live, with about forty thousand others who've also had their share of changes. Sometimes change is hard to see, because it's subtle and gradual, and other times we choose to close our eyes because we are comfortable being blind. 

Some of our Brave New World looks a lot like the old one that technology, access to tools, equality of opportunity, and enhanced diversity were all going to change. The gap between the promise and the performance has grown not only exponentially but also obscenely. 

Everyone talks about 'the children,' like maybe that should be capitalized, but the reality is we've got more children having free or low-cost breakfast in schools than ever before because how we live with one another has shifted from when you and I were school-age. 

We also have health clinics in schools because we need to have them somewhere and can't figure out where else they could be located. And that's just two examples that impact our municipal budget and have feck all to do with fire engines and who gets to drive them.

We've spent, literally as well as figuratively, a generation using government to accomplish programs that have little to do with why we created government in the first place, offering the argument to one another that 'someone has to do it!' 

Unless and until we can agree to define and then refine those tasks our government should be doing and which ones are our responsibilities, we can hold budget hearings until the cows come home (and guess who'll pay the dairy subsidy?) and never fix the fundamental problems. And to finish my opening point, we'll continue to put out our political fires with gasoline and take solace that our mileage may vary, but sadly, never the outcome.

-bill kenny

Everyone's Shadow Is the Same Color

Last November, in our municipal elections here in Norwich, Connecticut, we elected Swarnjit Singh as Mayor by a rather wide margin. Even though Norwich is in the less-than-populous Southeastern Connecticut portion of the state, we are, according to late-2024 census estimates, very cosmopolitan.

I'm sure we're not the only place in Connecticut, to say nothing of the rest of the country and world, where sometimes the things we do speak so loudly I can't understand what we're saying. 

I voted for our current Mayor because he promised to bring new impulses to a city I've called home for almost thirty-five years, which cannot seem to get out of its own way in entering the twenty-first century.

Other people cast ballots for the other candidate, which is their right and duty. But shortly after the election and swearing-in, small-minded, big-mouthed, noise-making generators who disagreed with Mayor Singh's tenure in office (and, in some instances, his existence) surfaced across a plethora of social media platforms.

The mayor is a Sikh, part of a population that is no stranger to prejudice and animus. I've lost count of the number of posters who fear 'sharia law,' which has nothing to do with Sikhs. The tenor and tone of the comments in the seven months since our elections have darkened and deepened and have long since abandoned any pretense of policy disagreement, instead, heading straight for racial and religious prejudice and hatred. 

Earlier this week, finally, an online poster was held responsible for his own actions and (I hope) is now learning that freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of that speech. I learned he isn't even a resident of Norwich, causing me to wonder about many things, including the 'nooks and crannium knowledge' he claims to possess (and I think the Thomas' English Muffin guys may want a word as well with him).

From space, we all look alike. We should try harder to remember that.
-bill kenny

Dominus, Go Frisk 'em

I think all of us have, or did have at one time, a copy of The Bible. After the Harry Potter and Twilight Saga novels, it's the most popular book in the history of the world. 

OK. That comparison is a little unfair since the Bible has been around a whole LOT longer than the Chronicles of Hogwarts. Any comparison of the battle between God and the Devil and that of Jacob and Edward always results in the latter two getting their asses kicked.

I still remember enough from my catechism classes to get a little bit weirded out by the contention that more than half of the Old Testament's fulfillment is bogus, according to many scholars. I mean, if that's God's will, I'm not going to criticize Her/Him. I mean, look at what happened to Jesus-and He was a relative. I'm thinking about Stake Your Claim and that's never a good sign. I'll bet Michael Moorcock would agree with me.

Yeah, I know, I'm erring on the side of caution. Could it be true? Yes, I guess; or no, of course not. How come the more we know, the less we're sure about? I'd be a lot better off with two forms of ID, and I'll tell you now that the prayer card you're offering me looks a little hinky. Can't say I recognize that face in that picture that you keep. It's too high, it's too wide. You're so low, you don't know how to get through, you go around.
-bill kenny

Not the E-Mail Kind

I'm a picky eater (and as my wife can attest, a pain in the butt in terms of what I eat and won't eat). High up on my list of latter foods would be SPAM.

When cornered, I'll concede I cannot explain my reticence about eating SPAM, and at seventy-four years of age, I'm quite comfortable going the remainder of my life without having any.

SPAM Musubi a/k/a 'Nope.'

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note I have NEVER eaten a bite of SPAM. My wife, on the other hand, very much enjoys it in all of the variations in which it is offered. I suspect she'll be very interested in the latest addition to the SPAM assortment.   

Say what you will, those bloody Vikings are culinary geniuses. Pass the mustard.
-bill kenny

 

Addiction or Affliction?

I was in my early Forties before I ever owned a mobile telephone. It was one of those flip models, with a teeny-tiny antenna on the top you pulled out before dialing. I don't remember if it texted or took pictures; it may have been a pretty plain vanilla device.

I have no memory of who made it, and there were no 'apps' to download. Those were much simpler times.

And then at some point, I got a Blackberry Pearl, and then what I always thought of as the Blackberry Classic. My mobile phone went from something I tended to forget on my home desk when I went to work in the morning to something a little more ubiquitous, if not also slightly sinister.

All these years on, like so many others, I'm a prisoner of my phone.
I suspect that's why they're called cells.
-bill kenny

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