Today in Norwich, CT, thanks to a lot of hard work in especially hard times by very generous people from across our community, we'll have our Annual Winterfest Parade. It looks like the weather will cooperate though that rarely changes anything--one year we had temperatures, I'm NOT making this up, in the middle sixties (my idea of winter-and my apologies to all the kids that year who got sleds) and the next year we had a raging blizzard (from which I developed pneumonia and when the doctor made a house call he came on dog sled. Oh, the irony!).
Today, when the marchers. floats, fire trucks and bands step off from Chelsea Parade (how perfect is that name?) at one o'clock, the weather should be somewhere in the middle which is where most of us are as well, I suspect. Even if we're not graduates of the London School of Economics, we know something has gone wrong and we're disquieted that whatever is broken is not getting repaired. Like you, I'm 'in the market' through my employer in some type of mutual funds (I think. Hey! I went to the Linden (NJ) School of Economics, so cut me some slack ) so I figured out Friday night if I retired on the first of January my wife and I could live on my savings and stock portfolio for the rest of our lives. Assuming we weren't planning on living past 1030 AM, January 2nd.
But today isn't just the Winter Parade in Norwich (and please come if you're in the area, it's a great deal of fun and that's in short supply these days), it's also the 67th anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor in whose aftermath the USA redefined itself as a nation and within the world of nations until the attacks of 911 to which the former is invariably compared. America of 1941, and the world for that matter, was very different from our world today and it's with that span of time, I suspect, comes some detachment in looking at the attack half a world away for those on the Eastern Seaboard.
I learned something about Pearl Harbor as a child in American History classes, and then later at college through my classes and studies and still later when I encountered men (and women) who had served in World War II, and not always on the victorious side. The more I learned, the less I knew which is one of the positive results of education: when you don't know what you don't know, you're at your most dangerous. When the last resort, armed force, becomes the first recourse, we all lose. I've never had the chance, yet, to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii (it wasn't the only ship sank and her Sailors weren't the only ones who died), but I'd hope to do so someday.
I wandered across the battlefields of World War II while living in Europe from Normandy, France (where every single bar is called June 6, or at least it seems that way), past the ruins in downtown Frankfurt am Main, (West) Germany, as modern a city as you could otherwise ever imagine. I visited Dachau, just outside of Munich, walking through the remainders and reminders of the barracks trying to grasp that people had lived (and died) there. I never got used to the fact that no birds were ever heard at Bergen-Belsen in the Luneberg Heide, one of the Nazi interim equations as they made their Final Solution. As if God, Himself, had turned His face from us, ashamed of His people, whom (we believe) are created in His likeness.
All of those spaces and places are connected as if in a straight line to Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the Rape of Nanking, and a thousand other geographic locales (more than 20 million men (and women) fought in World War II and the death toll of those who were non-combatants may be higher than that number) as a perverse demonstration that as noble as we can be, the depths of our depravity and indifference towards one another may not yet be plumbed.
Monday, for those who came of age with The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, will mark the 27th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. That my two children both were born after his murder still gives me pause. He had been part of the soundtrack of my growing up years from teenie through adult and while a lot of his post-Beatles material hadn't spoken to me in the same way as his earlier solo work or any of the Fab Four material, but his recent release at the time, Double Fantasy, was, as I called it when playing it at the radio station I worked for, 'a decent EP' (Extended Play) though I always felt "Beautiful Boy" was breathtakingly exquisite. I assumed without thinking Lennon would always be a part of my life (and of my children as well).
So much for the patience he sang of in that song. His son, Sean, was to grow up without his father (as did all of us, though to a different degree) and has worked to live within and without the shadow of the legend his father became. Not the best two days any of us will ever have, today and tomorrow ("Nobody told me there'd be days like these"), but in looking at the darkness that both have in such abundance, it can make our appreciation of the light and this, The Season of Light and Hope, that much more pronounced for all the days that remain.
-bill kenny
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