Understanding the Price of Freedom...

My mind is sometimes a projectionist’s fever dream as cross-generational imagery, historical, hysterical, some mine and some from before my time, coalesce and collide unbidden and unwanted. I can't watch, but I can't look away either.

All of those images pale when recalling street-level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001, and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes had seen

Who doesn't have a story about where they were on 9/11?  Today, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of those attacks, the shock and pain are still fresh. It’s as if history stopped at the moment of the first plane impacting. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over, and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.

The attacks of 9/11 created for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion, or color, including those not yet born, a shared memory in which pre 9/11 America becomes almost mythical. 

As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands, and tens of thousands, of men and women in uniform deployed around the world in defense of freedoms we too often take for granted here on the home front.

We'll offer thoughts for the victims of 9/11, but to better understand the price of freedom, perhaps we should visit the memorial at Norwich’s Chelsea Parade to remember the selfless service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Their memorial is just a few steps from Norwich Free Academy, where both were students. In such a way, the circle remains unbroken in remembering two young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, something more important than fear.

There's a German proverb, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

We can honor Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, not just today, on the anniversary of 9/11, but every day, by living fearlessly and helping one another become better people.
-bill kenny

Forever in Their Twenties

Tomorrow is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon (and Shanksville, Pennsylvania). Torrents of words have been, and will be, written about a day burned into the memory of the world. 

These words are not part of that but, rather, a remembrance of a different anniversary also tomorrow, September 11, but in 1982, in Mannheim (West) Germany. Two colleagues, Private First Class Bruce Scott, US Army, and Senior Airman Michael Sutton, US Air Force, were among the forty-six persons who perished when a U. S. Army CH-47C "Chinook" helicopter crashed. 

They were very young, as were we all back then, with their careers and lives before them. I work hard to remember them at this time every year, and the hole that will never heal that their absence left forever in the hearts of their family and friends.

-bill kenny

The Sweep of the Second Hand

There's still bright sunshine and a warmth that lingers into the late afternoon (just not as late as it did a month ago), but the calendar has no illusions: another summer has come and gone.

I'm hoping we have a Second Summer as we've had in recent years, and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. What's that you say? Winter? 

Sorry, I can't hear you, and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't won't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays- I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for Nikolaus Tag years ago, I'm over it now.

Truth to tell, considering the speed with which this summer passed (and yeah, they seem to accelerate as I age) and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here. 

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers), but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment, may be something us old people who think we're not should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

Carry Your Cup in Your Hand

It's hard to believe the golden summer for which we so yearned while slogging through snow and ice this past winter has, for all intents and purposes, come and gone. 

Those plans for vacations we hoped to enjoy have had their 'best used by' dates disappear before our eyes, and here we are at that place on the calendar where we start the next chapter and turn the page.

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. If your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the coming days, many of us will hit the stores armed with lists of school supplies and struggle to juggle after-school activities, our jobs, and fractious households that don't run themselves. Soon, too many will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Now, and when city budget discussions heat up in April, are really the only two times all year we devote any thought to education, which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. 

This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money but, and it's a cliché, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together. Our schools were so different from the ones our children/grandchildren attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world, and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony, by the knowledge age. 

This is typed on a workstation keyboard. Our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that should mean all of us, must recognize that the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny

The Remains of the Day

Our current President keeps reminding us that the stock market is at the highest levels in its history, but I've yet to encounter anyone, anywhere who can explain what that's supposed to mean when the price of everything continues to escalate. 

Of course, if you have a red ballcap (made in China) with four words written on it, those aren't questions you ask, which is what the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is counting on, so keep up the good work. 

As for the rest of us, this is Labor Day 2026:        

There's a Vietnam Vet with a cardboard sign

Sitting there by the left turn line

The flag on his wheelchair flapping in the breeze

One leg missing and both hands-free

No one's paying much mind to him

The V.A. budget's just stretched so thin

And now there's more coming back from the Mideast war

We can't make it here anymore.

And that big ol' building was the textile mill

That fed our kids and it paid our bills

But they turned us out and they closed the doors

'Cause we can't make it here anymore

You see those pallets piled up on the loading dock

They're just gonna sit there til they rot

Cause there's nothing to ship, nothing to pack

Just busted concrete and rusted tracks

Empty storefronts around the square

There's a needle in the gutter and glass everywhere

You don't come down here unless you're looking to score

We can't make it here anymore.

The bar's still open but man it's slow

The tip jar's light and the register's low

The bartender don't have much to say

The regular crowd gets thinner each day

Some have maxed out all their credit cards

Some are working two jobs and living in cars

Minimum wage won't pay for a roof, won't pay for a drink

If you gotta have proof just try it yourself Mr. C.E.O.

See how far 5.15 an hour will go

Take a part-time job at one of your stores

I bet you can't make it here anymore.

And there's a high school girl with a bourgeois dream

Just like the pictures in the magazine

She found on the floor of the laundromat

A woman with kids can forget all that

If she comes up pregnant what'll she do

Forget the career and forget about school

Can she live on faith? Live on hope?

High on Jesus or hooked on dope

When it's way too late to just say no

You can't make it here anymore.

Now I'm stocking shirts in the Wal-Mart store

Just like the ones we made before

'Cept this one came from Singapore

I guess we can't make it here anymore.

Should I hate a people for the shade of their skin

Or the shape of their eyes or the shape I'm in

Should I hate 'em for having our jobs today

No, I hate the men sent the jobs away

I can see them all now, they haunt my dreams

All lily white and squeaky clean

They've never known want, they'll never know need

Their shit don't stink and their kids won't bleed

Their kids won't bleed in their damn little war

And we can't make it here anymore.

Will I work for food, will I die for oil

Will kill for power and to us the spoils

The billionaires get to pay less tax

The working poor get to fall through the cracks

So let 'em eat jellybeans let 'em eat cake

Let 'em eat shit, whatever it takes

They can join the Air Force or join the Corps

If they can't make it here anymore.

So that's how it is, that's what we got

If the president wants to admit it or not

You can read it in the paper, read it on the wall

Hear it on the wind if you're listening at all

Get out of that limo, look us in the eye

Call us on the cell phone tell us all why

In Dayton, Ohio or Portland, Maine

Or a cotton gin out on the great high plains

That's done closed down along with the school

And the hospital and the swimming pool

Dust devils dance in the noonday heat

There's rats in the alley and trash in the street

Gang graffiti on a boxcar door

We can't make it here anymore.

-James McMurtry

Song of the Season

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid

Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.

She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,

And when the Legion boys come 'round

She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,

I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,

I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.

This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,

She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.

She always got her way when she struck for better pay.

She'd show her card to the National Guard

And this is what she'd say

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;

Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.

Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,

A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

The first Labor Day parade

Now I'm a union man, amazed at what I am. 

I say what I think, that the company stinks. Yes, I'm a union man

When we meet in the local hall, I'll be voting with them all.

With a hell of a shout, it's "Out brothers, out!" and the rise of the factory's fall.

Oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

Until the day I die. Until the day I die.

The union has made me wise to the lies of the company spies

And I don't get fooled by the factory rules 'cause I always read between the lines

And I always get my way if I strike for higher pay

When I show my card to the Scotland Yard, and this is what I say:

Oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

Until the day I die.

Until the day I die.

Before the union did appear my life was half as clear

Now I've got the power to the working hour and every other day of the year

So though I'm a working man I can ruin the government's plan

And though I'm not hard, the sight of my card makes me some kind of superman

Oh, oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

Until the day I die.

Until the day I die.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.

Until the day I die.

Until the day I die.

-bill kenny

A Pause not a Cause

I enjoy holidays as much as the next person, and when I worked, I took them off whether I deserved to or not, so if you have time off for this Labor Day, I hope you enjoy it. 

So, if you were looking for something profound or life-altering in this space today, sorry if you feel disappointed, but I'm only saying that really because I don't mind.
-bill kenny