A Conference of the Strange

I was born the same year Dwight David Eisenhower was elected President, though I had no knowledge nor any memory of my life with him as the Chief Executive. I remember being in the third grade at Pine Grove Manor School when Nixon and Kennedy ran for the White House. Politically astute even then, I can recall a very wise fourth grader telling me if Nixon was elected, kids would have to go to school on Saturday. That's when I decided to back Jack. There you have it-for all those who've suspected I am a Democratic left-leaning pinko liberal loser, that may have been the moment the road to perdition was paved.

Nearly fifty years later, I'm not sure I understand what has happened to the country I grew up in, returned to, and have grown old in. We had so much go so well for so long we don't seem to have any stomach for hard work or truth anymore. Our institutions which have always buttressed our way of life, from finances through relationships, are pretty much bankrupt and we don't seem to have the will or wallet to repair or replace them.

We've spent most of the last two years in a free-fall-and when I say "we" I mean what was once considered the middle class. For the better part of a decade, we traded blue skies for BMW's, washed our cigar boats with bottled water and elevated day-trading to an Olympic event. Meanwhile, for tens of millions of other Americans the prosperity of the Clinton Years never happened, so while we lament what happened, our neighbors never had that in the first place and now look at us as if we've lost our minds and maybe we have.

I spent about four hours yesterday in two meetings that had more in common than so many of the same participants in both the latter and the former--and though their names wouldn't be familiar to you if you didn't live in Norwich, the roles they played would be as they are found all over the United States. Be it micro or macro, it's almost always the same movie, just with a different cast. We seem to be having trouble, not with leaning forward and looking ahead, with my apologies to Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, but rather with accepting where we are and why we will be here for the rest of our days if we don't change the way we are-what I call Present Shock.

At both the national and local level there are two ways, it seems, to manage Present Shock. One is to do nothing but say no and insist that those in power are to blame for whatever we now see as a failure. The same folks with those 'how's that change thing going?' bumper stickers, two years ago had ones that described the guy in the White House as 'somewhere in Texas a village is missing an idiot.' Very helpful and thanks for elevating the tenor and tone of the debate.

The other response is to just keep pressing the same button even though the pellets stopped dropping a long time ago. I live in a state where we invented, I think, 'securitization'-- don't try to look it up, we've given it a whole different meaning than anyone in finance would recognize. We'll project revenues from the future and list them as receipts NOW as if they were real in order to balance the books. Does this remind anyone else of Wimpy's I Will Gladly Pay You Tuesday for a Hamburger Today? The line between M. Jodi and J. Wellington grows more narrow by the moment.

We're working very hard here to break the cycle and seize the day and the momentum, but there's still a longing for what was. If it could only be yesterday tomorrow, then today would be wonderful. We've failed to realize that (too) often the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth (of the habit) and that sound of footsteps we hear belongs to ourselves as we calculate the distance we'd need to outrun our own shadow. But after a while you realize time flies. And the best thing that you can do is take whatever comes to you. 'Cuz time flies.
-bill kenny