The Toil of Tradition

Traditions are important to help us remember people and events large and small. This Sunday offers another tradition though perhaps not the one you first thought. I've written about it before. 

On February 3, 1943, almost seventy-five years ago, at the height of World War II, the SS Dorchester, a converted cargo vessel pressed into duty and refitted as a troop transport ship was torpedoed in the early morning hours as the convoy of which it was a part was sailing from Newfoundland, Canada to a port in Southern Greenland.

The ship with 904 troops and civilian crew aboard sank bow first in about twenty minutes. The severe list as it sank prevented the launch of some of her lifeboats and subsequent overcrowding of the remaining lifeboats caused some of those that were launched to capsize, spilling their unfortunate passengers into cold North Atlantic waters barely above freezing.

Because of the ship’s sudden sinking, no distress signals were sent delaying the start of any rescue attempts. When help did arrive the following day, many who had survived the sinking were floating in their life-jackets, dead from hypothermia. Only 230 men were rescued. The Dorchester sinking was the largest loss of life of any American convoy during World War II.

Among those who died onboard were four US army chaplains, who helped frightened soldiers board lifeboats, and gave up their own life-jackets when the supply ran out. The four, (Methodist minister, Reverend) George Fox, (Reform Rabbi) Alexander Goode, (Roman Catholic priest, Reverend) John Washington, and (Reformed Church in America minister, Reverend) Clark Poling, then joined arms, offered prayers for the living and the dead, and sang hymns as the ship sank.

Their deaths serve as a courageous example for the living, especially now when our nation faces challenges and uncertainties. They continue to this day to inspire.

The Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104, on Merchants Avenue in Taftville will conduct a Four Chaplains ceremony this Sunday afternoon at 2 honoring their selfless sacrifice and celebrating their lives.

Father Brian Converse, Pastor of Our Lady of Lourdes Roman Catholic Church in Gales Ferry, Reverend Cathy Zall, Pastor of the First Congregational Church of New London, Rabbi Julius Rabinowitz, Rabbi of Beth Jacob Synagogue in Norwich, and Reverend Scott Schuett, Pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Lebanon, each representing the faith of one of the original chaplains, will deliver a benediction, representing the final moments aboard Dorchester. Rabbi Rabinowitz will be the keynote speaker.

The ceremony is both thoughtful and thought-provoking and you’ll come away with your own lessons learned of lives truly lived with grace under pressure in a spirit of caring and generosity for others that I think is sometimes lost in the tumult of our lives.

Please join us if you can this Sunday afternoon, if not in Taftville then wherever you are to remember their heroic sacrifice. All history is the sum of our collective remembrances and such memories remain our best hope for the future.

-bill kenny

Seance Begins at Nine Tonight

"He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States."

The most presidential and least orange Trump I could find

There you have it. That's the history behind the reason for the annual appearance of the President of the United States speaking to the assembled Congress. I've never understood where the 'equal time' provision for the loyal opposition on all the broadcast TV networks comes from, but that's a quest and query for another time. 

As you've already surmised, I don't especially care what Cadet Bone Spurs says (but others do and these folks will track his every word); what he and his crony kleptocrats have done is more than enough to turn my stomach though he seems to have no track record of honesty or veracity to fall back on. 

Sometimes the things we do speak so loudly I cannot hear what we are saying. And perhaps only in my recent memory, that's just as well as shame and anger are about the only visceral responses I seem to have.
-bill kenny 

"I" and Other Pronouns

I'm not sure our schools teach English grammar and vocabulary the way they did when I was a slip of a lad growing up in America before Edison invented the light bulb and Al Gore the Internet.

We learned about Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (and the more mature of us knew of Henry Miller and James Joyce), but they were all the stuff of English Literature and had nothing to do with diagramming a sentence or identifying the parts of speech that comprised a sentence. 

Sentences that asked a question were always interrogatory; statements could be declamatory and/or expository and, of course, there were exclamatory remarks. Each in its place and in its moment. 

There were nouns, verbs, predicates and objects surrounded by adjectives and adverbs, free-range propositions and grazing gerunds, predatory participles (my old friend, the future pluperfect back when I had more future than regrets) and infinitives, split and otherwise. 

The Terror of the Eighth Grade, Sister Mary Jean, had a diagram question on every English test every Friday and it never had anything to do with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, James Joyce's Dubliners or (Lord, literally, forbid) Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

When we left one of the least charitable of the Sisters of Charity's eighth grade, we had the souls of first shift torque-wrench turners at the Ford Mahwah assembly plant in terms of lyricism, but we could diagram Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in less than two minutes (or three less than it took Abe to deliver it ) while two fourth-period miscreants, sentenced, as penance, to accomplish the same for the remarks delivered by Lincoln's predecessor to the podium, died along the way. 

And if you're keeping track, exactly ten, count 'em! ten, first-person plural pronouns appeared and zero singular--by comparison, go here, and grab at random. Sister Mary Jean was right-when we don't have to diagram them, our sentences are filled with worthless and meaningless words for everyone, but most especially and tragically for ourselves.

"Of Life immense in passion pulse and power, 
Cheerful, for freest action form'd under the laws divine 
The Modern Man, I sing." 
-bill kenny

Sickness to Insanity

Sometimes there are situations and events you know you will work your way back to. At a given moment you have other concerns but you will not allow the passage of time to carry a moment so far downstream that it will escape your memory and consciousness without being remarked upon. And so it is with me, now.

Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It has been seventy-three years since the Soviet Union's  Red Army liberated Auschwitz, Poland. You and I want to believe (actually pretend is probably the operational word) in 2018 it is impossible that the industrial horror and mechanized savagery of The Nazi's Final Solution could ever be forgotten but, look across the globe (and not too far over a state line), and not only is that not so but we encounter deniers who lie to themselves and others who insist that none of the nightmare that was the Nazi's Final Solution ever happened.

Such people are not misinformed and attempting to excuse them by suggesting such makes you complicit in their misdeeds. Simply put, they are evil for so believing, and for persisting and insisting that the horrors that happened, didn't occur. You're busy and don't want to find the time for viewing this right now. 

I almost understand, except because we don't all have the time for the truth, the lie gets yet another chance to spread some more and it oozes its way into more lives and we sink a little deeper in the muck of our own perdition.

Every year, there are fewer and fewer survivors of the camp who observe the anniversary of its liberation and someday in the not too distant future there will be no one with first-hand recollections. That's why, in a world with strife and death driven by deep-seated and irrational hatreds of all kinds, where truth has become some kind of obscene fashion accessory we, each of us, needs to be a witness for the truth of the Holocaust and for injustice and murder anywhere we find it on this earth.

As it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.
-bill kenny

A Visit with a Memory

Short and sweet today (I know, 'how unlike you! LMAA), because I needed this and was delighted to rediscover it and more so to now share it again. 

You're welcome.
-bill kenny

Realize or Real Eyes?

As someone who’s famously tiny-handed and orange found out, repeatedly, last year, healthcare is really hard to do really real. Its degree of difficulty is, of course, elevated by its importance for every person in our nation, especially in terms of successfully delivering quality, affordable care that’s accessible for everyone. 

So far, the USA’s experience (as I see it) seems to be “there are no right answers and no end, so far, to the wrong ones” not that that’s stopping us from bearing down and plugging ahead. Nothing beats a try like a fail it’s said and having often been called trying by even my most immediate family members, I wholeheartedly agree.

But as someone with healthcare, even as I say ‘bravo!’ for the efforts, I must also add, ‘as bad as it has been around here on the Affordable Care Act, look at this to see how much worse it can all get.”  

I will tell you that I usually don’t say anything when I’m seen by a nurse at my doctor’s office since my attitude has always been ‘what could happen?”. Now I think I have my answer and wish I’d never heard the question. 

-bill kenny

We Know It's a Sickness

We live in a nation under siege by a plague of violence of our own making. 

In this space on other occasions, I've raged like a beardless King Lear as the sea of opioid abuse slowly engulfs us. I have no idea what a solution for that looks like and I can only take small solace that it seems to be in a footrace with gun violence (again) for which will destroy us first.

More sending of thoughts and prayers.

We tell one another we have no idea how these tragedies happen and never get close to speaking about the why. 

Stop looking at people with whom you disagree with murder in your heart because far too often and far too easily, it moves from the heart to the real world, real fast. 

What if we repeal the Dickey Amendment and study guns and violence across our culture as the illness it has become? Right now we don't know we what we don't know about the relationship between all manner of guns and all manner of violence and we need to find out before we succeed in killing one another. Please.
-bill kenny

Suiting up for the S(o)uper Bowl

The weekend's professional football championship contests are over and the New England Patriots will battle the Philadelphia Eagles on February 4th in Super Bowl LII (and people say Latin is a dead language! (technically they would say, "Lingua Latina mortua est.")).

Between trips to the grocery to stock up on snacks and delectables for whatever shindig you're hosting or attending and/or settling down in front of the television to watch what always seems to be almost two weeks of pre-Game Day reports to set the tone (this year, the true life story of Danny "Playoff" Amendola, told in real-time), I have a project that needs your help.

Please put your #1 Fan foam finger down (and thanks for the choice of fingers, by the way) and consider lending a hand in support of a Souper (spelled that way for a reason) Bowl much closer to home that will give you a warm feeling and make sure a lot of other people can enjoy warm feelings they can eat with a spoon.

I'm talking about the Saint Vincent de Paul Place Souper Bowl of Caring to tackle hunger. 
It kicks off Monday and runs through next Saturday afternoon, February 3rd. It's our opportunity as amateur members of our caring community to suit up and help tackle hunger (with no worries about helmets, snap counts or play calls. 

What's desired, actually that's a poor choice of words on my part, what's needed are donations of as many cans of soup as possible. Think of a number (c'mon, make it bigger than that); now double it and then double that again. Nope, that's still not enough, but it's a good start. 

You don't have to do it by yourself. Generosity is a team sport so feel free to work with family and friends, or those across our neighborhoods or with those with whom you work to collect as many cans of soup as you can and bring them to Saint Vincent de Paul Place at 120 Cliff Street anytime, starting at eight Monday morning through three o'clock on Saturday afternoon, the 4th. 

But, as they say on TV, 'wait, there's more.'
The opportunity to help is far from the 'one and done' of the actual Super Bowl. 
In addition to dropping off donations at Cliff Street,s you may also send a  donation via their secure website at https://svdpp.org/food-donations or be part of their fill-the-truck effort next Saturday at the Super-Walmart in Lisbon from ten AM until 3 PM, Of course anytime, you're in the Norwich Souper Stop and Shop, feel free to add your donation to their collection box.

During the holiday season, we're all really good about thinking of those who are in need of our help and in acting on those thoughts, The trouble is that hunger doesn't take a holiday after the holidays are over.

Neighbors in need come to Saint Vincent de Paul Place for food from their pantry to take home as well as for meals cooked and served in their dining room. The pantry serves over 250 households, adults and children, every week not just from Norwich but from close to two dozen area towns. Last year, over 520,000 meals were distributed underscoring the sad fact that hunger knows no zip code.

Our donations will put warm meals in every home during these cold winter months. You'll feel like a champion no matter who wins Super Bowl LII by helping out, so suit up and soup up.
-bill kenny                       

A River Can Be More than Water

This is from a while ago.
It made me smile when I found it and I hope it will do the same for you.

I spend a lot of time involved in, and engaging with, 'Social Media' and I don't even know the half of it though I am knee-deep in Big Muddy, more or less with them.

The way we can extend our humanity through our command of tools and technology is awe-inspiring when you think about it and that we are so callous and careless in how we interact with one another suggests to me we don't think about it very often.

There's a backstory to today but not the one I am not telling you. It begins long ago in Frankfurt am Main and then forms into two streams, one in Austin, Texas and the other in Norwich, Connecticut but only involves two of us until right here and right now.

As of here, take and make of this what you wish and remember everything sooner or later is West of Memphis. Especially Anything Made of Paper.
-bill kenny

All the Makings of an Annual Event

For anyone who thought (or hoped?) that last year's Women' s March" would be a one-off, I hope this weekend showed you the error of that kind of thinking. It's pretty simple to understand, it really is. 

Since the stimulus for all the discord hasn't gone anywhere and remains ensconced in the White House (and its vestiges and behaviors can be still be found everywhere), it's logical that the response will also remain except for when it grows a little larger every day.  

#ManyPeopleAreSayingIt'sTimeForAChange

It's time to get up and stand up, all of us and all at once.

-bill kenny

Past as Prologue

I wrote this the last time we had a federal government shutdown because I was infuriated at that time with the total absence of comity and communication between and among those of the two major political parties. I'm still pissed from all of the BS that went on in 2013 so don't try to take my blood pressure right now. 

Consider yourself warned: it's not likely I'm going to be a one and done on the topic of polarization, vilification, and demonization of someone else's political perspectives even while myself engaging (if not delighting) in doing exactly the same thing. Yeah, that's me a hypercritical hypocrite; I'm probably the problem in this country. Anyway, a blast from my past that I thought/hoped we had passed out of. Turns out 'nope,' was and remains the once and future answer. 

I'm numbed by the political poop from just about everyone who's popped up on my TV since last night midnight when I found out me and about 800,000 other federal employees would be screwed out of an opportunity to do our jobs and to get compensated for that effort.

Seriously, Far Right Noise Machine of the late, great, Republican Party-now you care about our active military and our veterans? I'll ignore the dirty, stupid wars you've been sending our men and women into for decades. Should I tell you about the obscene rate of suicide among veterans that we shrug off and how you've been cutting the budget for the Veterans Administration for years? Why bother? You already know all that.

The Alt-Right within its ranks is the Republican Party's cross to bear-not mine or yours and we cannot fix them or help them heal. Speaking just for me-I don't want anyone with an R behind her/his name to get better at all. And if I have my way they won't.

Here's the deal all current members of the Republican Party seeking office, anywhere within the sound of my voice. Even if I liked you (note the verb's tense) yesterday or voted for you previously, the blush is off that rose.

For me to pull the lever (old image-new one is to darken the circle) for you on the first Tuesday of any November with an election, you will need to rid yourselves of those meddlesome priests. Sorry-not interested in why you can't or how come you won't. Not my problem just as how they're wrecking my life and others isn't yours.

Welcome to quid pro quo, population: you. If you don't unload Alt-Right, Far Right and All White advocates from your ranks, I will vote for whoever is NOT a Republican; anyone-even if that choice is a slug, and it may well be. Yep, I will cut off my own nose to spite my face; that's why I have a fresh roll of duct tape to help me keep my glasses on.

Here's a handy list of everything the DC Clown Car helped shutter even as the Art of the Deal Guy who Maxed His Cognition Test did nothing but tweet blame so you know I'm not being petty. I'll go to work tomorrow to close down my office and then make it a point to file for unemployment on my way home (or maybe just come home and file online). CSPAN will be thrilled I'm sure by the uptick in viewership; they already know why it happens.

-bill kenny

  

"This American Carnage Stops Right Here"

It was the briefest of instances at the very start. "...This moment is your moment, it belongs to you. This is your day. This is your celebration. And this, the United States of America, is your country."

First lie: 'the largest inaugural crowd in history, period." And downhill from there.

Not that I expect you'd have the guts to stick around in DC this weekend but if you did you'll be seeing what promises to be a MUCH larger crowd, also focused on you though not that you'd appreciate the attention. Actually, there will be a lot of crowds in a lot of places none of which a bone-spurred coward like you would be willing to be anywhere near. 

I know the expression goes, 'time flies when you're having fun,' but it has been crawling for a year. I cannot be alone in counting down the days. As of one minute after midnight this morning, it's 1095. not that you asked. Tick, tock, Kleine Hände. 

I had hoped you might grow into the office of the President but that hope like every other one has been dented and dashed. An inch was added to your height at your physical. And all the while the stature of our country as viewed by friends and foes around the world has been steadily diminishing. That's your doing and yours alone.

The shape of things to come

The day is fast approaching when you and the swamp you vowed to drain but, instead, put in charge, along with that army of greedheads, grifters, and grafters all the way to the rafters will be consigned to the dustbin of history. I would tell you, that you will be sorely missed, but like you, every day, I would be lying. Starting now. 
-bill kenny

Thoughts While Not on the Road to Damascus

Driving into work yesterday morning, questioning as I do when driving in the dark the whole value of 'Daylight Saving' and springing forward and falling back with the clock, behind whatever those little Jeep things are. Not the Wrangler; I know what those are. I think they're called a Patriot or Compass or something like that. I leave as an open question for Jeep devotees (and our son is one) whether or not the small ones are even Jeeps.

No matter. We were traveling across Norwich long before dawn on the New London Turnpike which, as we head towards Three Rivers College and past the Ice Rink, is very much a residential area with lots of small, older houses and so you need to be mindful of your speed. 

I'm so good at this mindfulness stuff I can be mindful of more than one thing at a time so while watching my speed behind the little Jeep, I could also spy her/his sticker for Planet Fitness on the lower right-hand side of the back window. It's a very successful nationwide chain of gyms, though unlike Jeep who slaps that label on everything they make, we don't call Planet Fitnesses (that would be the plural?) gyms, perhaps because they don't have basketball courts(?) 

As my punctuation on the previous sentence suggests, I'm not sure why we have something called fitness centers when as kids growing up all we had were gyms. It's like sneakers. When we were kids, going to the gym, you had to wear sneakers to go anywhere near the basketball court. Yesterday, in the dark, behind the little Jeep with the fitness center sticker, I was wearing sports shoes that cost me over one hundred and thirty dollars (American dollars) on my way to work after having stopped at Planet Fitness.

I think you might now have a better understanding of why I have such a jaundiced eye about so much of what man hath wrought in the decades I've been watching. It's entirely possible that the person in the little Jeep had been in the same Planet Fitness that I was and was now heading to work as well, except they weren't because they hung a quick right at whatever that street is called with the Miller's Stamp Shop sign on the corner and continued on their merry way whereas I went to work which are not necessarily two mutually exclusive paths but, I wasn't feeling merry, if you follow my drift.

The reason I mention any of this is that just before the little Jeep hung the right and continued south towards Yonder or wherever, they opened their driver side window and threw a lit cigarette out and it bounced on the street in front of me and to my left. And, back to that mindfulness thing I'm good at, that caused me to wonder what the point of hitting the gym was if you continued to smoke. It's not like after four hundred miles on the treadmill, you'll get a new, pink lung (at least I don't think so). 

From where I sit, behind the little Jeep in the dark on the way to work it's like cutting six inches off the front of the blanket and sewing it on the back and thinking you've added a foot to its length. On the other hand, after careful observation, I've concluded after decades of observation that God takes smokers and physical fitness fanatics in about equal number. Perhaps more, or less. I can't really tell because it's still early and I know not if it's dark outside or light.
-bill kenny 
     

David and Gordon Are Pleased

Sixty-eight years ago, American sociologist David Riesman authored a book about the post World War II (American) middle class, The Lonely Crowd, regarded by his peers at that time through to our present day as the 'most influential book of the 20th Century." 

The phenomena of feeling alone in a culture with more and more means of social interaction almost on a daily basis is so widespread here in 2018 across our planet, except possibly in some of those "shithole/shithouse countries," that it's really not a phenomena at all, but a somber frame of reference and also a source of concern by all manner of mental health organizations.  

Great Britain, which is about to gain a Princess, while losing the entire European Union has made news, assuming a failure can report other than fake news. And while the sun always sets on the British Empire, Britons, great and small, rather than tell their troubles to the hand can share their blue mood with Tracey Couch, the first-ever Minister for Loneliness. Winston Churchill would swell with pride and wonder if this, perhaps, was their finest hour.     

"Just take a seat they're always free; No surprise, no mystery. 
In this theater that I call my soul, I always play the starring role."
-bill kenny 

My Back Pages

It was about this time eight years ago these words, usually vastly improved by an editor, started showing up in The Bulletin. I was looking at some of the earliest of them over the weekend and was humbled (only somewhat of course) by how often I may have been mistaken and yet was seldom, if ever, in doubt. I was also disappointed I didn’t sound more prescient, or taller though the mirror suggests I'm far greyer and considerably wider (what did I expect buying a used fun House mirror?). 

I'm not the wide-eyed optimist I once was and have ruefully come to accept that being a pessimist means you can only be surprised but never disappointed. Mainly I was struck by how little everything and everyone seems to have changed, though I'm hoping your mileage may vary. Read for yourself:

"Is this the year we start to finally change Norwich back into a place where our adult children will want to come home to, or from which all who have the wherewithal to leave, will flee with a haste that borders on the unseemly as a retreat becomes a rout? 

"Pardon an outsider’s observation, and after all these years I concede that for many, I’m still NFH (Not From Here), but we don’t know how we got here, and, more importantly, are unwilling to work together to get to where we want to go.

"We need to stop waiting for Hartford, which is politically and financially exhausted, or for Washington, D. C., which is too far away, even more broken, and has too many of its own problems, to ‘save’ us. 

"And we need to finally wake up from the recurring dream we have of finding that one big development project that will transform the three rivers upon which we were founded into flowing honey and the falling raindrops (and snowflakes) into gumdrops.

"The only help we can count on, and should, is the assistance we give to ourselves. If we're looking for a helping hand, look no further than the end of each of your arms; that's two and that's a start. If you join hands with those of your neighbor, we have an initiative--and if three of us work together, it’s a movement. 

"Every person, every building, every block and every neighborhood, one community. We've seen the hard way what working to benefit only ourselves has gotten us--a society of sharpened elbows and people not afraid to use them. Far too many have stopped trying and so we who are willing must also pick them up as we take ourselves along to where we need to get to in order to rebuild and rediscover the spark in the dark that made us who we are.

"It's not ever easy, and it's not instant, but we're not in this life or nation, or circumstance, alone. And we can do this, because, when you get through with all the platitudes, we have no other choice. You're burning daylight, sitting here reading this, my friend. The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.”

Let the Games Nearly Begin!

The 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, Republic of Korea, are less than a month away, with or without the participation of the ROK's irascible neighbor, the People's Republic of Korea, who are in the 'make nice' part of the mandatory program right now (and perhaps supplying the musical accompaniment).

I'm not sure what the ancient Greeks who invented the Olympic Games would make of a Summer and Winter version or the inclusion of curling in one of them, but I think they might have difficulty understanding all of that as a reason for me to reprise some observations from this time eight years ago. I suspect no matter how often they read what follows it would still be English to them.

It's nice, Living in the USA, to believe democracy is a natural state of being for all The Lord's creatures, great and small, proletarian or kulak, Gucci or Gulag-and maybe it is, but it's more than likely money makes the world go round (and Joel Grey just this side of Creep Show scary). 

Even as the dominoes fell in the late eighties and early nineties, the dustbins of history filled up with the ruins of totalitarian states, the bastions of communism collapsed and Captive Nations went free range, there was no relief for the people of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. (Castro's Cuba, often described as nearly as bleak and barren, at least has baseball, and rum and coke come to think of it, though they did decline an option on Mark McGwire.)

What little news that ever escapes from North Korea is almost always relentlessly grim as living conditions are reported as so poor it seems impossible anyone, anywhere, could live in such a manner. Thus, I was stunned, yes, stunned, to read yesterday the same nation that threatens at least once an hour to engulf the entire peninsula they share, albeit grudgingly, with South Korea, by unleashing a ferocious all-out assault on their neighbor, is now wooing American tourists.

I know, sounds like something NatLamp, back when it was real magazine and a really funny one at that, would do as a parody but this is a real story (actually, it sounds more like something Jello Biafra and the Gang might have come up with as follow-up). I'm curious as to what American tourists would (could) do in North Korea. 

And talk about unnecessary requirements, the longest you can stay is four days. I know, 'Aw shucks!' Me, too. In what fever dream would I have to be living to spend the entire flight home digging pieces of the Pyongyang Airport tarmac from under my fingernails because they had to drag me onto the plane?

Gotta admit the Arirang Mass Games Festival sounds interesting, for an hour or so-a two-month celebration of the birthday of the late "Great Leader"? On the other hand, I guess it beats the heck out of trying out new recipes for stone soup and rock ragout. Where's Comrade Rachel Ray when you really need her? 

Inadvertently see something you shouldn't, and those four days in North Korea could feel like the rest of your life. Mail me a postcard, Comrade, and sign it 'the workers control the means of production!'
-bill kenny    

Only in the Darkness Can You See the Stars

Today, a federal holiday, is the 89th birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. James Earl Ray made sure he would never have to blow out all those candles by murdering him almost half a century ago. 

The deaths of American icons you've read about in history class in school, JFK, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy, I was alive for all three and lack the words to tell you what we were like as a nation before their passing but I assure you we are better people because they lived.

I was a high school sophomore, a pimply too-loud white preppie kid, wandering around Washington D. C. on a school trip my father organized through the middle of  Resurrection City, just weeks after Dr. King's assassination. 

I was stunned at the scale and scope of the settlement, the audacity and eloquence of the vision that propelled and compelled it into existence and the pervasiveness of the poverty and despair that made it inevitable and necessary. Reinventing American society so that the reasons why it had to be would become history and aren't part of our present or future, is a part of the legacy of Dr. King.

Today across the country there are ceremonies and commemorations. Ours in Norwich at City Hall starts at a quarter past one this afternoon with some speeching, a little preaching (I'm guessing having attended this event for over a decade) as well as singing followed by a march to Evans Memorial African Methodist Episcopal Church for warming words on what is usually a very brisk New England winter's day and then we'll all go home, back to the lives we lead and the people we are.

I would hope this year, unlike any other before it, across this country, we can seize a moment from whatever we do today to celebrate the dream of Dr. King, make it our own and keep it on our hearts. And then, beginning tomorrow for all the days that remain to each of us, use it as a fulcrum, as he did, to change the world. Again.
-bill kenny  

I Prefer My Stand-Up as Comedy

I am an unapologetic libtard, a social justice warrior, and a snowflake. At least according to those whose politics are different from mine. I have a sobriquet for them as well, the first syllable has three letters and starts with an "A" and the other syllable is hat. 

That was an attempt at humor. Someday we'll look back at that and laugh though I've gotten a head start on it already. Actually, politically, I consider myself to be a relentless pragmatist which doesn't quite fit into the pre-formed and labeled box that others have laid out for me. 

Yeah, I dislike POTUS45 (though maybe not this one), but then again who doesn't? I should point out I have as little patience with those on the other side of the aisle from Tiny Hans who always seem to suffer a physical injury every time he does anything, regardless of what it is. Methinks thou doth protest too much, but then again I think that of everyone.

And yeah, when Trump targets people in one of his twitter rants my flesh crawls but it does the same thing when his FCC chair eliminates Net Neutrality, his Secretary of Agriculture  relaxes federal guidelines so that junk food is back on the school lunch menu or when his Secretary of Education writes blank checks for all the make-a-buck universities that rip off students. Drain the swamp indeed, my very stable genius friend. 

Maybe my greatest concern with the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is his systemic and systematic diminution, degradation and disparagement of the free press whose protections are enshrined in the First Amendment (not that half of his cabinet knows anything about any of the amendments). 

Trump's cries of #FakeNews every time there's a story he doesn't like are, to my ears, just so many waves crashing on a distant shore, especially when you travel halfway around the world and find a bozo like Prayuth Chan-ocha whose full-time job is prime minister of Thailand, a formerly staunch ally of the US in southeastern Asia where friends of (Uncle) Sam are few and far between. 

Where many leaders around the world can claim to have found their jobs through the NY Times, Chan-ocha became prime minister in 2014 after a military coup that was intended as a short-term solution to his nation's political instability. Four years onward and he's now a part of that instability. With little imagination, he could easily make the list of 'special countries.'  

When #FakePresident takes shots at media outlets and reporters he doesn't agree with, he green lights egregious semi-fascist overreaching stupidity like that exhibited by Chan-ocha and so many others around the world. Democracy dies in darkness says the slogan with and without cardboard figurines throwing shade from all the corners of the globe. 

As George Orwell offered so eloquently about a different time in our collective history that we chose to believe would and could never happen again, "Freedom of the press if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose."    
-bill kenny     

New Colossus

"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

My dismay as a card-carrying SJW and snowflake is that a very large number (into the millions and tens of millions) of my fellow citizens and voters went 'hell yeah!' when Mr. Trump threw his invective-hurling temper tantrum because THIS is exactly how they feel. 

I'm not sure how we have become the country that we are and I am at a loss on how we can talk ourselves off the ledge we have insisted, on venturing farther and farther out onto. I do know we need to find a way to build bridges rather than walls or we shall perish as fools who destroyed the greatest idea this species ever had.

"Oh, we come on the ship they call the Mayflower

We come on the ship that sailed the moon

We come in the age’s most uncertain hour

And sing an American tune."

-bill kenny

   

These Rubber Bands Are Killing Me

Looking at recent news headlines I'm becoming fearful that we may have started to wear out our welcome on this planet. 

Just in these United States in the last ten days we've had stories about snow and ice in (over) abundance in places that have four seasons though not as intensely as they're having this current winter resulting in some testy exchanges among us, measurable snow in the Sahara (sorry, Sting), as well as forest fires, torrential rains and mud slides in California. Not sure we're the ones to call anywhere else a shithole.

Not so coincidentally because it's Friday (though Sister Mary Jean would be pleased I remembered and made that reference) here's some news from Switzerland from earlier this week which probably didn't cross your radar and may remind you of the ancient theologians' worries about angels, dance routines and pins.

I'm still stuck on the word decapod but have been ever since seeing Moana's Tamatoa (and would undoubtedly go broke just trying to pay for the butter). The finer points and nuances raised within the story are not lost on me. If you're the proud possessor of an over-sized bib with your initials on the pocket, this might be the moment to take a moment and reconsider your eating habits. 

Or not. You'll hear no judgments from me. I'm still wondering how hungry the first person to ever eat lobster had to be to come up with that idea in the first place. 
-bill kenny