There are so many wheels within wheels in the lives we live that trying to separate one from the other is just about impossible. Everything is so linked and in so many places at so many levels that adjustments you make in one area of one aspect of your life have consequences and echoes that you don't often see or feel immediately, or ever. It wasn't that long we started to hear huge news stories on bio fuel production. There were serious and lengthy pieces in newspapers like the Christian Science Monitor and the NY Times, in the pages of Forbes and Newsweek and you saw a nod to the ubiquity of the story when there were (photoshop) pictures of farmers sitting on Massey-Fergusons and John Deeres in the amber waves of grain wearing the head coverings we normally see on Saudi sheiks. Sure was a good idea 'til greed got in the way .
Meanwhile Saturday afternoon regular gasoline at the Citgo near the Stop & Shop in Norwich, CT, was $3.67 (nine/tenths, cannot disrespect the fractions, my friend) and, as we've discovered, when demand dictates price (the unfunny Marx brother, Karl, stumbled onto this one), the market can be driven in one direction by a small precipitant. So now that we have folks who make fuel out of grain competing for corn and wheat and oats and soy with the folks who always bought it before, if you've been to a grocery store lately you know what happens to the prices of those items made from those crops, or those whose animals are fed those crops. So it's just as well as it's getting too expensive to drive to the store as we can't afford to buy anything once we get there.
None of this is of any solace, of course, if you're in the "Third World" (I believe you get there by making the second left at the first light) and you and your family are going to bed at night and waking up in the morning with the constant companion of gnawing hunger not because the planet doesn't produce enough food for all the bipeds who on it but because there's not enough money to incentivize the successful feeding of everyone. Everything gets to this certain dimension, winds up on a customer's plate and then gone.
Do the things we do, or don't do, in Norwich, CT, matter to you, where ever it is you are? I'm not suggesting at some John Donne level of the bell tolling, but more practical magic-are we all in the same boat or in boats that are in the same ocean? Do you wonder about where the next life-altering great idea is going to come from? In all the centuries we've walked the planet since getting up out of the primal ooze, those ideas have arrived, so that's not my concern. I'm more worried about the when because I'm thinking maybe it needs to be sooner rather than later. We have other distractions in my neighborhood and maybe you do, too. Do you have NFH issues where you live? NFH standing for 'Not From Here', which has had a bad name ever since the natives watched from afar as the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria dropped anchor in a forgotten harbor over five centuries ago. How is it we've forgotten that everyone is from somewhere? It seems to me, we (not just in my here and now, but yours as well) can use all the brains, hearts, hopes, prayer and help we can get and not waste a moment more checking out one another's pedigree (or behind if that's how it's done where you live) to see where we all come from.
But as I said, that could be just me; after all, I'm not from here. But, like you, I am here now. And I'm a week shy of being here for 56 years on my way to who-knows where to do who-knows-what and it gets lonely on the way and I've discovered people who can use some cheering up and bracing. And it's not any real work, it's just taking the time to hear them when they speak and to listen to their silences when they don't. We, although perhaps not yet in Norwich, CT, but hopefully, where you are, are so much smarter together than alone, it seems silly to not work together. There's safety in numbers when you learn to divide. How can we be in if there is no outside?
"And when the mighty chains of darkness had me on the ropes, everyone said 'quit now'. That's when I found hope." And hope is a four-letter word.
-bill kenny
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