Relentlessly Cheerful

When I write about national politics, something is going on. Either I have become incredibly insightful, erudite, and educated on electoral dynamics and the psychology of the crowd.

I'll pause until the laughter subsides- in space they can't hear you scream, but in cyberspace I can hear you mock me- or we went from knee deep in the stupid to hip deep in the last decades. I'm thinking it's the latter. And you're hoping that's the worst of it but fearing it isn't.

We are slowly going broke, with the slowly part accelerating on a daily basis. We are so deeply in debt within a generation that all hope of finding our way out will be extinguished forever, and we will be a nation trapped in involuntary servitude to whoever holds our treasury notes (even if they're in a language we don't know how to read).

We have lost the war on drugs. We long ago lost the war on poverty, and from what I've read online, the war on literacy, while going splendidly, means soon we'll have no one who can report on its success, which is just as well, as we no longer have anyone to read about it.

And speaking of war, though we don't talk about it anymore, we were at war in Afghanistan for two decades without once ever explaining to ourselves what victory there would look like. 

Americans of all ages and both sexes in our armed forces there who aren't killed or wounded in combat or murdered by the very people they were told we are there to help came back so beaten and broken by what they'd seen and done they cannot ever be made whole, which is just as well because we can't afford to fix them. Luckily we have lots of street corners they can stand on with squeegees and rags. 

Having finally walked away from that car crash in Southwest Asia, we turned around and repeated all the mistakes we made in Afghanistan and Iraq in the Strait of Hormuz, trading desert sand for salt water devoid of shipments of oil and natural gas that the world needs to run. 

Since I mentioned helping and healing, let's not forget universal affordable health care, which many third-world nations, including the one ninety miles off the Florida coast already have, but we sure don't, and aren't you proud to be an American where you can die waving the flag (!) because you lack the money for a doctor or medicine to make you better.
 
And perhaps it's better that we die now since we've criminally underfunded and fleeced private sector pension plans, and anyone depending on Social Security will soon feel like George Armstrong Custer waitin' for the guys from the fort to get here.

It's the saddest part of Catch-22 where Yossarian tries to help his mortally wounded comrade and ends up dressing the wrong wound as Snowden freezes to death while bleeding out in the skies over Pianosa. We won't even have the luxury of a silk or golden parachute if we don't stop allowing ourselves to be distracted by chatter that doesn't matter. 

We've 77 days and a wake-up to Election Day in November. I'm tired of standing this fire watch by myself while the pyros take turns trying to put a match to everything we worked to build. And argue all you want, but we did build this.
-bill kenny

Over the Rooftop Sails Billy....

I love living in a society where everyone believes we should take turns (probably because, as a now-elderly white heterosexual man, I was born on third base and have spent my life thinking I hit a triple). 

As long as the entitled get to go first. I, too, believe the Lord helps those who help themselves, which is why He/She gave me two hands to grab it all and two pockets to put it away. But there's always someone with a better idea.

I'm wondering how much more we might get done if we began every meeting, from a town hall or city council session to a US Senate hearing, by trying the balloon trick. 

At the very least, we'd have an opportunity to meet someone both like and unlike ourselves. Of course, as Mae West pointed out, the danger with balloons is that it takes only one prick to ruin everything.
-bill kenny

O, No!

On my way into an office building the other day, I saw a sign on (what proved to be)  the only working elevator in the facility that read "OOC." I must have been raised by hermit crabs or something, since most of the stuff everyone else seems to know automatically I not only never knew but, upon learning react very badly in responding to. 

This elevator thing was both the former and the latter. I learned OOC, notice the caps, is "short for 'out of commission.'" Really? Actually, as I pointed out to the explainer, broken is short for 'out of commission'; I'm not sure what OOC actually is except stupid because of the second O.

My problem with the second O? Since when does 'of'' get its own letter? We are Living in the USA, not the USOA, which is what we should be if the elevator is OOC. Perhaps it's a 'good for the goose, good for the gander' rule, as SL could mean almost anything but we all know about SOL. And why isn't it SOOL since the o's are for 'out of'?

Do you remember "FYI"-for your information? Now it's been moved upscale and uptown to FYSA, for your situational awareness. Huge improvement, don't you think? I am not making that up-I got a note in the mail recently that began with a paragraph explaining FYSA with this doozie: BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front.

If the purpose of the acronym is to speed communications, but, in so doing, you must halt the conversational flow to explain your intellectual shorthand, what have you saved, and for whom? And is that always, or even more than sporadically, a good idea? 

It's not like we can buy anything with all this additional time, and I don't know where you can trade it in for vowels and consonants to make even more words to explain that cunning stunt (say that three times fast) you invented. But I'm willing to give it a go if you are, OIBiY. Oh, I Believe in Yesterday. Saved you a whole 2:05 right there. You're welcome.
-bill kenny  

Take a Number

These are dog days politically in Norwich this summer. So many of us are angry about so many things; it's truly a target-rich environment here in the Rose of New England. 

Our current top blood boiler (or close) is the ongoing operational and jurisdictional tug of war between/among four of the five volunteer fire companies in the Town Consolidated Districts, who, together with the paid fire department for the Consolidated City District, maintain our fire protection. 

The Jersey boy in me thinks it's a turf war, but that's probably an unkind oversimplification. Or not. Anyway. Everyone has lawyers, and who knows how long this will continue. But it makes for lively social media, trust me. 

The police are desperate to have a new, more up-to-date facility. They've been making do with a building that's been too small for the almost thirty-five years my family and I have lived here. The solution has always been, 'let's wait until economic times improve' before taking on a lot of added debt for construction. 

That mindset had voters reject a proposal for a thirty-million-dollar facility about a decade ago and then years later, a forty-million-dollar facility. Since it's never been built, the current price tag voters will look at this November for a new police station is now fifty-five million dollars. And still I encounter fellow residents who don't understand why the cost keeps rising.   

We have a possible massive expansion of our Grand List, which might help homeowners like me who have about 70% of the property tax burden right now, with an Amazon Fulfillment Center being sited in our still-has-that-new-industrial-park-smell-on-it in the Occum Industrial Park. There will be public hearings on this, since online chatter has been all over the map, with support and opposition reactions.    

All three of these issues have many aspects: economic, public safety, political (what isn't these days, right?), and rarely spoken but plainly visible, purely personal. We are a small town with lots of like-minded people to match, and we're happiest when we're unhappy. At this moment in the summer of our discontent, like it or not, we are delirious. 
-bill kenny

Picture This

Thanks to smartphones, everyone and anyone can be a photographer.
Not necessarily an Ansel Adams, or in my case, Gomez Addams, but we can dream, can't we?  

I admire great pictures. FULL DISCLOSURE: I consider any photograph I like 'great,' so there's a circular circulation thing going on there, and I have known some very talented photographers willing to be seen in public with me. 

But today, I wanted to share these images because they're breathtakingly beautiful.
-bill kenny

Better Living through Chemistry

There's been a generational changing of the guard with (illegal) drugs in America. When I was a wee slip of a lad, not that I or anyone I knew ever partook of The Herb, in the late Sixties and early Seventies "drugs" was marijuana and if you were flush, hashish. Stop asking about those Uriah Heep and Lothar and the Hand People albums in my collection, okay?

It was all very social and sociable, both communal and community at the same time. You rarely heard anyone say 'I have weed, I'll see you later' but more often, 'We have weed, man am I hungry.' I've been told marijuana may have been responsible for the spread of fast-food places to all sorts of off-campus locations across the country. 

Don't know if it's true, but will point out that I lost more than one friend who went for a shake and an order of fries and never returned. Funny. Once governments at all levels figured out how to tax it, marijuana was legalized. Sort of like the miracle at Cana.

The Eighties saw the spread of Chutes and Ladders and pharmaceuticals like Quaaludes, perhaps the dumbest drug ever created (until fentanyl). We cranked up the crazy in the Nineties with just enough malice and mayhem to require a separate category for 'hard drugs' like morphine, heroin, methamphetamine and the ever-ubiquitous crack.

And as the drugs got harder, so, too, did the people who dealt them because it became a multi-billion dollar business. The head shop with the dime baggies under the counter between the patchouli oil and the electric bongs gave way to the cigar boats we first saw on Miami Vice, which, in turn, were co-opted by narcotics submarines and human mules. 

It was we who helped create the appetite for self-destruction that fuels businesses which create cascades of cash, and the violence needed to protect that cash and all the trappings and trimmings that go with it, while at the same time funding a "war on drugs" that siphons off nearly as much money as the disease it purports to be battling. 
-bill kenny

Der Bingle Was Right

I came across a thought from Dr. Robert Anthony, who enjoys a reputation as a relentless optimist, prompting an acquaintance to offer wryly, 'he's never been to Norwich.' That would be funny if it were not also true.

I've adopted the good Doctor's mentality as my own, because in the dog days of summer, I can use all the help I can get and because the last time I had an original idea, it died of loneliness. Here's his most (to me) memorable observation: "Most people would rather be certain they're miserable than risk being happy."

Seriously.
Who does that sound like? Anyone we know? 

Having arrived here almost thirty-five years ago with my family, I believe I've been here long enough to consider myself from Norwich, but I'm still not used to the cheery cheerfulness with which we expect things to fail.

The poets say "it's always darkest before dawn," and often it seems our clocks are stuck at a minute before daybreak. To make matters worse, assuming that's possible, not only are too many of us permanently unhappy, we seem to begrudge others any happiness as well. As if happiness were something so finite and so rationed that every time I smiled or laughed, you lost an opportunity to do the same.

What we have is a system that dictates that for me to look good, you need to look bad (at whatever you do or whomever you are). Everything that is perceived as successful is because of my efforts, and failures are despite my attempts. Each of us is quick to claim the credit but even faster to parcel out blame. 

But the problems of any city are bigger than any one person or one group of persons. Instead of concentrating on creating a definition of our city's economic and political challenges and opportunities (the indefinite article is deliberate), we have little tribes, some larger than others but all working in an intellectual and cooperative vacuum, who each claim to have devised the solution that must be accepted and implemented immediately.

That's when the waiting game begins-the waiting to see an idea fail; not 'if' it will fail, but 'when.' We can then search for the guilty, reward those who were not involved in the attempted and now discredited solution, and become enthused for the next Flavor of the Month proposal that comes along. We may secretly believe it, too, will fail completely, but no one wants to say that aloud and not be a team player.

We value false comity over genuine collaboration. What's needed is a team vision that attracts supporters and a process to produce results for the benefit of everyone rather than at the expense of some. Government that's done for people and not something done to them. Perhaps then we'll start to see happiness.
-bill kenny