Somewhere Back There in the Dust

I like to think that because I always admit I'm a self-absorbed Obliviot, that I'm not as bad as the next briefcase-carrying drone scurrying out of the anthill on his way to the secret reserve of sugar water. Such a fatuous hypocrite, and delusional, too.

Don't know that I've mentioned it and I'm doing so now to place the 'Blinding Glimpse of the Obvious' in its proper context, but since the New Year, I write a once-a-week column, 450 words, for my hometown (and very small) newspaper. It's my chew toy, subject to the same restrictions and protections Peter Zenger struggled to make possible and that I take for granted.

I have no illusions that any of the words I write will end up in a time capsule, unless a very famous dog has an historic bowel movement on the part of the newspaper containing the column because it was raining too hard to take Rover for 'walkies.' Yeah, possible; but not probable.

My concern in looking at it on the newspaper's website yesterday was there was a word misspelled in the headline, which I don't write, and I couldn't figure out what it was, until I came home and looked at the newsprint version and had my Eureka! moment.

Then, sitting at the kitchen table, having a tuna fish salad sandwich on Arnold Dutch Country Smooth Texture Premium Potato (Dan! No E!) bread I glanced down and encountered Marc Munroe Dion (his middle name is spelled two different ways on the same page). In my newspaper, his observations were entitled "In small town, loss of loved one isn't suffered in vacuum." In the Clay County Advocate-Press, where I found the same column, the title was "The Ties that Bind Us Together."

In recent weeks, the big news in The War (because there is only one, doncha know?) has been all over the MSM, Main Stream Media. The folks who cannot tell Billy Crystal from Stanley McChrystal have been blewed and screwed as pointy heads from think tanks dissect the state of hostilities in Afghanistan. There has been a lot of chatter about the 'sudden escalation in violence' (what the US media call attacks on the American military. Afghans are getting killed at about the same rate and pace as they have for centuries, so don't worry, okay? Unless, of course, you're an Afghan).

Eight US troops died in the last two days, and my big concern in The Wide World of Me was a spelling error...it took Marc Munroe Dion's written words to force me to be here now. I see the casualty reports from the Department of Defense; they are delivered by email if you sign up for them. I did and they are. The ages of those killed numbs me-they are each all some one's child and they are gone forever.

I can not pray for them as I've lost my faith and so I worry for them working to get to tomorrow and adding to my list those not yet there but going, knowing I cannot protect any of them because we now live in a world where no one's child is safe from empty souls who hate because they have nothing to live for except to make other people die, too and not having any idea as to how any of this could have happened, but knowing that it did while I was on the watch, but saw and did nothing.

-bill kenny