"Let's Get Ready to Lindellllll!"

I'm not sure there's anyone on earth for whom I have less use at this moment than Minnesota's Very Own, Mike Lindell. 

Aside from proving to be a walking. talking punchline of my favorite Cheech and Chong routine, I don't 'get' him at all. And in light of the fight that he's picked with both Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, instead of a lucrative next act as the commissioner of this up-and-coming sport, he may need a cornerman as he runs out of corners to hide in.  

I will say that I believe the sport's organizer/founder is on to something when he describes his audience as "(T)hey want to see good competition, they just don't want to see the violence."

What he really means is 'they just don't want to get any of the violence on themselves.' Kinda like the way we prefer our news of the world.
-bill kenny

Ever Onwards

We live in a most amazing age.

As residents of a planet where around the world via the electric fire of television, we watched the murder of a President, a walk (actually more like a skip) on the moon, the tearing down of a Wall that divided a continent and a nation, and the destruction of buildings and thousands of lives in a flash of jet fuel, steel, and glass, it's sometimes easy to forget we are, each of us, skin covered miracles.

Helping underscore this assumption (actually for me, more like an article of faith) I can offer you only one item as 'proof', conceding I don't know that it proves anything but that every day we get up and amaze and amuse, often in unequal parts, the other seven-plus billion of us on this ant farm (with beepers) we call home.

Some days are so hard, it's almost impossible to celebrate yourself, no matter how important that is to do--it's okay, watch this, and celebrate someone else, and know we, too, can do this.
-bill kenny

I've Seen it Spelled with a Silent but Visible "C"

Tonight before the first candle of the menorah is lit:  

.ברוך אתה יי, אלוהינו מלך העולם, אשר קידשנו במצוותיו, וציוונו להדליק נר של חנוכה

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tsivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah.

Blessed are You, Lord our G‑d, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to kindle the Hanukkah lights.

Happy Festival of Lights to all who celebrate!
-bill kenny

The Same and Yet Different

I thought at my age I had a good idea what ballet was/is. Nope. 

Not surprisingly to anyone who's chanced across this space on the interwebz in the last dozen or so years, ballet is yet another subject about which I have no clue. 

Here's why.

I'm rarely at a loss for words so mark today on your calendar. Wow.
-bill kenny

 

Within You and Without You

This not-at-all-November-like-weather we've been having (so far) presented me with an opportunity the other morning to do a good deed that, except you already know I'm pathetic, I should be too embarrassed to recount.

I wound up with a hitchhiker in the front seat with me-barely visible. A gnat I guess or maybe a tiny fly, who didn't appreciate the grasp of tools we humans have that enable us to form glass and make windshields for our cars. The little bug(ger) kept bouncing off the inside of the windshield, regrouping on the dashboard and attempting to fly off again, into the window.

I don't consider myself to be anything vaguely like a 'one with the universe' kind of guy. As a matter of fact, I'm very much the person most of the rest of the planet cites on surveys as to why they don't want to be from 'here' anymore. Despite what others say, I believe we should all take turns-it's just that I think the line forms behind me if you follow my drift and I know you do because deep down, you're the same way.

This weather right now is remarkable (and if you wanted a sled for Christmas, please don't hate me if I hope you are keenly disappointed) in terms of temperature and temperament and yeah, I know fall and winter will arrive with a vengeance and probably on the same day, but today would be the best day ever if I could wear cutoffs (long enough to cover the scars on my knees) and a short-sleeve shirt.

That's probably why, to NOT jinx anything or anger Anyone, I decided to roll down the front windows and coax the bug to escape. I'll be honest, it was about as mild outside as it was inside and who among us doesn't love doing favors that cost them absolutely nothing in the first place. You doubt me? Try this: ask me if it's okay to borrow your neighbor's car this weekend. Sure, go right ahead! See? That was easy and trust me, in five minutes I won't even remember giving you the green light.

It took the bug more time than I'd have liked to make his way out. Perhaps I was the first car it was ever in (glad I'd just had it cleaned inside and out; you never get a second chance to make a good first impression) and after the bug was gone, it occurred to me I had no idea where it was from. 

Perhaps it was a Norwich gnat and now was wandering around in Ledyard (or Preston, I sort of lost track). I'm not sure how territorial bugs are (or need to be) or how well they interact with strangers. I may have provided safe passage for a colonist or an innovator.

Of course, driving home I heard and then saw a splatter on the outside of my windshield and wondered if I had just witnessed another Circle of Life moment. Hakuna Matata, indeed.
-bill kenny

From Far and Near We Travel Home

In honor of the warmed-up and recycled succulent side-dishes we'll enjoy during odd moments for the next couple of days after the dining table is finally cleared today, here's some Thanksgiving notes I offered a few years back. 

And for the record, that's real stuffing, not Stovetop. Just sayin'.

Maybe where you live the preparations are already underway. We're borrowing chairs from neighbors who were planning on borrowing them from us. A search party to locate card tables has been formed, a place has been cleared for the kids' tables and the aromas already emanating from the kitchen are causing mouths to water.

Thanksgiving may be the only holiday in America where many of us become, if just for the day, math majors as we try to compute how many hours how large a turkey needs to be in the oven at how many degrees so that it can feed a houseful of family and friends we've invited to join us for dinner. And let's not forget how many side dishes and who's bringing what--all important elements on our national Day of Thankfulness.

No matter how rough times have been leading up to this week, and for a lot of us they sure have been tough in what has been yet another difficult year, we still make that extra effort as we put a smile on a care-worn face and enjoy the warmth of home and hearth.

Let's face it, the smiles have been in short supply as times turned bad and then stayed that way. Many of us have seen local businesses fade and then close and neighbors move on and away in search of something more than we have right here, right now. And in those households that are still here, a lot of us are doing a little more with a little less than we did last year.

Despite what you may think, we're the fortunate ones. When you talk to those who help out at food pantries and kitchens such as Saint Vincent de Paul Place, they'll tell you how the need is again greater this year than it was last year and we all remember how last year too many were in need of too much.

We already knew that. The army is stretched thin-in this case, I mean the Salvation Army, which has been deployed with its red kettle and ringing bell for more than a few days, and who'll use anything you can spare and share. So thanks in advance for your generosity.

And while the big headlines on newspaper front pages in recent weeks scream about the legislative Armageddon in Washington DC, closer to home, many of us whisper and worry about the cost of heating oil and a winter that has yet to arrive.

On a brighter note, Saturday at one is the Winterfest Parade which kicks off at Chelsea Parade and concludes in what, for decades, was the heart of downtown Norwich, Franklin Square.

Ready or not, the holidays are here, and as we gather family and friends closer to celebrate, and hopefully in the rush and crush of events we can remember strangers are friends we haven't yet met and give one another hope when we celebrate Thanksgiving.

-bill kenny

Thanksgiving 2021

As someone who likes to think of himself as being slightly ahead of his time, in this case, admittedly, cutting it a little finer than usual, let me be among the first (few hundred thousand/million) to welcome all of us to the threshold of the holiday season which more or less begins with Thanksgiving tomorrow (followed on Monday by the first first day of Hannukah) with Christmas cheer for all, ready or not, closely on its heels. 

Maybe just me, or perhaps because of yet another more shadows-than-light year that's nearing its end, it might feel a little out of place and presumptuous to extend good wishes to you and yours from me and mine as the holiday season, such as it is, begins in earnest. But as my mom used to say (and yours, too, I bet), gratitude is what makes what we have all that we need. So here we are

It's easy to lose sight of our blessings and the gratitude we should have for them as social and work obligations and community events collide, collude, and accelerate as they approach even as the still-fall days darken earlier and the temperatures drop (and our reasons to be cheerful seem to grow fewer and farther in between) and the race to the start of winter nears its conclusion.

Instead of enjoying a moment to appreciate the gifts of hearth and home that we have, we sometimes look to the lives of the famous and fortunate and yearn for that which we don't have. The ringing of the kettle collection bell one of the ways that I know the holiday season (however you define it) has arrived, doesn't cause us to count our change along with our blessings so much as to worry about for whom the bell tolls and when it might be ringing for us. And in truth, we should be cautious, but not fearful.

We have much to be thankful for as a city. We have hundreds of volunteers and neighbors involved in nearly every aspect of any activity throughout our community, each with a passion or a project that not only brightens their lives but ours as well. 

We have professional emergency medical services and own and operate our own public utility. We have teachers and schools the envy of cities ten times our size, a community college that calls Norwich home, a spectacular public park and a location between Boston and New York, straddling two popular casinos in the middle of Mystic Coast and Country here in the Northeast Corridor like few other places.

We're not yet a city that's turned the corner, but we're getting there with every new participant in a neighborhood watch, every new small business that opens, and every time someone new moves into one of our neighborhoods. Norwich in years past waited for the world-now we are preparing to meet the world, to be more active and engaged with it and one another than we have in decades. Yeah, I know I keep saying that but I'm gonna keep saying that until it comes true, so you may as well join me.

There are challenges ahead and not the easiest of times awaiting us. But we should be thankful we have one another and are developing the confidence to live out loud. Don't mourn what we've missed, celebrate what's yet to be. To those to whom much is given, much is expected and we should expect much more from our city and from ourselves, not just this Thanksgiving holiday but every day.
-bill kenny

Greg Louganis to the Courtesy Phone

When I was a kid I used to swim like a fish. All of us did, perhaps most especially Kelly who used to stay in the water until his fingers were so pruny you thought they'd never look normal again, and who used to violently shiver because he was so cold from all the time he spent in the water.  

Turns out we had nothing on Dobby, Gillis, or otherwise. And, btw, nice splash.
-bill kenny

Another Time, Another World

I've gotten a lot older than I thought I would when I was a kid and considerably older than a lot of people I've encountered in my life would have preferred me to become. What I see as in-the-blink-of-an-eye is for so many a form of ancient history they cannot conceive. Today is a generational divide underscoring my point. 

I wrote what follows a long time ago for something that happened even longer ago(er). 
I called it:

What the Heart Remembers

I wrote this some years ago for an event that happened in another, more hopeful America that I think may have vanished forever on this day fifty-eight years ago. That was the day John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas, Texas.

As I type that sentence I'm stunned to realize how much has passed since that day. For you, this is like reading about the first walk on the moon's surface or the Fall of Saigon. For me and my generation, this is a part of who we are because we remember all of these events, because and/or despite what followed them.

JFK wasn't a better person than those whom we have chosen since to occupy the White House nor was he worse-if events and circumstances make a person who will master them, then he was a man of a different time and all of us can't pretend to be able to compare and contrast then to now. 

We were and now we are. And those we lost along the way have only us to bear their witness. That so much of then looks a lot like some of now is as much a function of perspective as it is of situations.

All my memories of the days of coverage in the aftermath of his assassination are black and white. They are not the misty water-colored memories, the song would have me believe, of the way we were but rather, grainy high contrast black and white moments stapled to special editions of newspapers and hurled at us by television stations engaged and engaging in their first national seance. 

We gathered in our living rooms or those without a TV stood on sidewalks in front of appliance stores to watch over and over again the film clips as the Secret Service agent clambered up the back of the moving limo, Jackie struggled to cradle the dying man's head, and Walter Cronkite removed his glasses and gathered himself before reading the teletype news telling us the youngest man ever elected President was now dead.

Video on demand? I guess. 

What we had was when Dad turned the set on, you heard the vacuum tubes humming and warming up. Slowly the picture grew larger and clearer. When it didn't, he would smack the set on the top or on the side, one short, sharp blow-that was your on demand back in the day.

A lot of people, perhaps one whole generation and portions of two others, did a decades worth of  growing up "in winter 1963 when it felt like the world would freeze."
-bill kenny

With a Fine Truth Comb

Since it gets bandied about in our civil and often less than civil discourse with one another and repeatedly invoked in our mass media of choice and choosing, here's something worth chewing on, the definition of truth according to Merriam-Webster. 

I am especially taken with the turn of phrase, 'the things that are true.' 

If you think I'm raining on your 'the vaccine activates the 5G nano-trackers in your blood so JFK Jr. can find you faster' or 'the November 2020 election was as crooked as the veracity-impaired now-former president insists' or in particular, 'waves of unvaccinated caravans of illegals are streaming across our southern borders to take our jobs,' then yeah, you probably need to put a raincoat on and do up those galoshes. After all, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. 

Somewhere at some point truth went from being an integral and essential part of our national dialogue to roadkill on the human highway. A fashion accessory sold only at the finest stores and for a limited time only. 

If we've learned nothing since the start of this century it should be that such a notion is bullshit. 

The big, beautiful lie will be the death of us yet. Just gimme some truth.
-bill kenny 

#MoreThanAHashtag

I am a flaming heterosexual, white man of nearly seventy years of age so my ability to be patient and allow folks to diddle around and get away with misrespecting and disrespecting one another is just about exhausted. 

I am well past the 'this is not my first rodeo' phase of life and I am continuing to gather medical documentation that the promise of infinite sunrises and sunsets is just another beautiful lie. 

I do know that we are a short time here and a long time gone so not seeing the best in one another or not being the best to one another is, at least the way I was raised, a sin. 

Five years on, the prayer remains the same.

Prayers are fine but actions speak louder, so start yelling.
-bill kenny   

From the (Song) Book of Paul

Think of butterfly wings beating and tidal waves halfway across the globe. 

There's a thin red line that connects all of us to each of us, whether we like it or not. The good thing about a belief like that is no matter how far away we are from one another, we share the air and the sky. 

As Paul Simon once warbled, "The answer is easy if you take it logically." 

Do not ask for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee, Art. 
-bill kenny

Leroy Anderson Has Some 'Splainin' To Do

I'm a child of rock and roll. I was the oldest of my parents' children so I didn't have an older sibling to walk me through hootenannies and folk music, or Belafonte-inspired calypso or any of those vocal white guy groups with identical haircuts, matching sweaters, and harmonies like the Four Freshmen. 

Growing up I don't recall a lot of radio in the house. I do recall a lot of Broadway musical soundtracks coming from the Fisher cabinet Dad bought from Liberty Music on Fifth Avenue in New York City; a piece of furniture whose whole function seemed to be to attract dust that became the bane of mom's existence. 

I mention all of this so that when I tell you my idea of classical music is early Beatles, you can appreciate my perspective if not actually accept it.  And I mention The Beatles and classical music in the same sentence (twice in a row if we're keeping track at home) because for quite a large number of years I was quite pleased with myself when I said I very much enjoyed Leroy Anderson's The Typewriter.  

I realize your reaction might be more of 'that's ninety seconds of my life I'll never get back,' but, as they say on those late-night TV infomercials, wait! There's more! 

I don't imagine the maintenance crew appreciated amateurs appropriating their tools but I think we'd all agree that great art takes sacrifice.

Proving again, your eyes and ears, and yours alone, determine what you consider art.
-bill kenny

The Seasons Shift

My wife and I celebrated our 44th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago. Well, I celebrated. I think my wife put on a brave front and made the best of it all. We have shared the last thirty of our years together as residents of The Rose of New England, raising two children (she did most if not all of the heavy lifting), our son, Patrick, and daughter, Michelle, to adulthood. Both attended the now closed and gone Buckingham School, then Kelly Middle School, Norwich Free Academy, and then up and away into the big world.

I thought a lot about the years and the changes those years have brought that she and I have seen since arriving here while enjoying another glorious autumn New England weekend). Don't get me wrong. When it comes to winter and snow I am not nor have I ever been a fan since I spent thirteen months in Greenland back in the middle Seventies while wearing Air Force blue. Oddly enough, it doesn't keep you warm-trust me on that.

Autumn is a good time to pause and take stock of where we have been and where we are going as the days, already short, seem to grow more so as Daylight Savings Time ended earlier this month and the calendar fills with holidays. I was thinking about who we were when we first arrived here and some, and most certainly not all, the people we have been in the ensuing years.

We've lived on the same street for all this time, surrounded by friends and neighbors who raised their families here as well. Our part of the street had all, or most, of the children back in the day and everybody went to school together and after school, everyone played with everyone else to include a homegrown specialty, "Home Run Derby." It was, I believe, unique to our block and played almost all year round. It had more to do with being neighbors than it ever had to do with baseball. That was then and Home Run Derby is now a memory.

All of our children are grown now and almost all of them are gone, some near and others far, many with families of their own. Our part of the street was quiet for many years as most of the school-age children lived on the other end and their laughter and shouts rarely carried to where we sat in the quiet waiting for what might happen next. In more recent years, younger children have started to come back on our part of the street, like the tide kissing the shore and giving us all a more lived-in feeling

Intellectually, I think we accept the notion of change without ever really accepting that change is like the ripple from a pebble in a pond and begins at the center or, in the case of a community, with each of us and radiates outward. It's all well and good to talk about the importance of 'investing in education,' but if you will not concede that such an investment could mean your taxes will rise, all the talk is worthless. Our recent municipal elections will have consequences for years, and longer, to come but many of us who did vote (and it wasn't as many as should have) took less to decide on ballot choices than we would with a take-out menu.

We can spend as many hours as you'd like talking about the way things were in Norwich and play Pin the Blame on the Passing Years while dreaming and scheming of better days, but unless and until each of us can let go of hurt and hard feelings from decades of decisions whose intentions may have been laudable but whose outcomes were less than optimal we'll keep circling for a landing without ever arriving. There is no standing still. If we will not move forward we shall fall behind and once that happens we end up very close to where we are right now.

Look around. Accept the colorful leaves on the trees fall to the ground and turn brown but realize by so doing they permit the budding of the next spring and assure a new beginning.
-billl kenny

The Silent M in Masses

When/if your belief system doesn't encourage, allow. or accommodate new information or differing points of view, it's not actually a belief system. 

It's a superstition.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
-bill kenny 

Two at Eighteen

We've got her. "Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty promises." 

And we've got him. Blubbering.

Life on earth continues to be a dark ride.
-bill kenny 

Hiding from the Weather

One of the downsides to living where there are four seasons is the transition from summer to autumn, especially for the trees and their leaves. I am very much of the 'live and let live' persuasion which translates to the 'lie and let them lay' position on leave gathering. I've noticed this year in my neighborhood, some of us have gathered so many, it's as if we're waiting for them to fall from the trees and nab them on the first bounce. 

We rake them up and some of us, maybe you have the same kind of neighbors where you live (maybe you are that neighbor where you live) place them in black plastic bags awaiting pickup by the trash folks.

If it happens around here the way I watched it happen just the other day in Waterford (the home of the speed bowl, not the crystal), the dustmen empty the plastic bags into their trucks and discard the bags. Causing me to wonder what the point of the plastic bag was/is. 

Elsewhere I've seen these VERY large paper bags filled with leaves-in theory because the paper is biodegradable, all of it can go directly into the landfill--or do you think they're headed for incinerators? Around here we have trash to power incineration units though I've no idea how much energy we get from such an operation.

For millions of years, I estimate, we as a species did nothing with the leaves as they fell. You see all that dirt all around us? I have a funny feeling where some of it might have come from and I'm not sure what we're accomplishing by how we're operating now. While I wasn't looking compost has become a lost cause, it seems, perhaps even a dark art. In its place, we have created a first-class annoyance, the leaf blower. 

We went from devices that looked like vacuums and picked up fallen leaves and plopped them into bags (do you remember those?) to a gadget that hangs from your hip and can be used to blow leaves that have fallen on your property into someone else's yard or out into the street.

I think leaf blowers are a much more accurate and contemporary symbol of America in the 21st Century than either the Bald Eagle or the Stars & Stripes. There's nothing that says "Wha?!" more than a guy on a Sunday morning working a leaf blower wearing dark shades with Ibuds in both ears. And I'd ask him why he's doing what he's doing, but he's as oblivious to me right now as I am to him for the rest of the year. Ahh, Sweet Suburbia. We've got Mother Nature on the run--now what?

"This is my street, and I’m never gonna to leave it,
And I’m always gonna stay here If I live to be ninety-nine,
’Cause all the people I meet, Seem to come from my street.
And I can’t get away, Because it’s calling me, (come on home)
Hear it calling me, (come on home)."
-bill kenny

With the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster We Get Pasta

I don't know if End Days are coming. 

I mean, let me rephrase that with apologies to James McMurty, 'Every day's the end of days for some,'  And when you've been wandering in the desert without manna or water or even a shred of hope for either for as long as I have (thanks, Google Maps!) you can get surprised at how much Religion, capitalized because as Lenny Bruce once called it, it's Religions, Inc., has changed. 

It's a fine line between the Prince of Peace and Pasta, but some of us are walking it like Duna riding a bicycle (bell on the handle sold separately, Garp). And if you look upward while praying to whomever it is you are offering adjurations, then the Aetherius Society might be your cup (and flying saucer) of tea. 

Neither Tom Cruise nor John Travolta is listed as a member, so it already has that going for it.
-bill kenny

Maybe It's the Leaves

I've done enough reading about Seasonal Affective Disorder to know I'm sad, not SAD. 

I go through it every autumn and for the same reason: I hate winter. Coward that I am I take it out on the falling leaves instead of the falling snow and blustery winds. 

And in addition to the sadness, I have this nagging and growing doubt that's slowly elbowing aside my pseudo-self-confidence and I'm not sure what to do about that. I've spent most of my life frequently in error but rarely in doubt so this sensation is both very new and unwelcome.

The Germans call it Tor-Schluss Panik, the fear that the doors are starting to close. 

And in my case, those fears are very rational and I have the somber-faced health care professionals to prove it. I'm kind of hoping for a mild winter, both of my discontent and our immediate area. I'll get back to you on how that all works out, assuming it does.
-bill kenny 

Late at Night When I Can Dream

Thank you for your service Dennis Baptiste, Rik De Lisle, Craig Miller, Roger Williams, Bill Swisher, Estevan Vasquez, Michael Slattery, Nat Clymer, Gerald Martin, Lowell A. Whitman, Mark van Treuren, Walt Zielenski, Bill Clark, Jhi Laveyl, Carey Chet Campbell, Mark Cornell, Lee Hilliard, Bob Close, Mark Streeter, Christopher Hall, and Richard Real.

And also thanking Sara Jacoby, Donna Scheel, Sally Foster, Diana Danis, Ellen Gunther, Linda Thompson, Bonnie-Erin Reiley Page, and Gloria Zielenski for your service on this, your holiday, Veterans Day.

As Barack Obama observed not that many years ago, "In the face of impossible odds, people who love this country can change it." I am honored to know all of you and to have served with many of you. And, yes, together, I believe we can and must change the world. -bill kenny

A Sky Full of Holes

Not everyone will make it to Taftville's Memorial Park tomorrow morning at 11 for their annual Veterans Day observance sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2122 and the American Legion Post 104. 

Holidays that are observed where they occur even if it’s in the middle of the week present their own challenges in terms of organization and attendance which is why shifting stuff to Mondays became popular but I’m glad we don’t do it for Veterans Day.  

But we'll miss you as we pause, if not exactly stop, and thank all of those who wear and have ever worn the uniform of any branch of our armed forces.

Some folks I know roll their eyes at some (okay, at a lot) of the things I write or say, and all I can do is smile, shake my head and suggest (mostly using my inside voice, I hope) that they attempt to do something anatomically difficult (though if successful, it might be the most productive endeavor some have been engaged in for years) in response. 

I hate to be difficult, although I am very good at it. I spent eight years serving my country in an Air Force uniform defending freedom of speech and on occasion I insist on exercising a little of it for myself as well.

Tomorrow is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present. When I was a kid, it was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of The World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. 

I'm never sure what lesson I should be learning when I realize just about the only things we seem to number with Roman numerals anymore are world wars and Super Bowls, though I am happy that there are so many more Super Bowls. 

Many nations across the globe, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, call tomorrow Remembrance Day and there's a part of me that likes that title a great deal because I think about all those with whom I served while in uniform and for those decades afterward as a Department of Defense civilian.  

We have a day when we recall those in uniform who gave their lives for our country, Memorial Day, and I have always appreciated the idea of a separate day set aside to honor everyone's service. One of the traditions of Veterans Day observances is the moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918 when the Armistice that ended World War One was signed.  

We had people serving in the military before we even had a country. After all, geographically as well as historically this is where the American Revolution started with farmers and shopkeepers grabbing muskets and forcing the world's most powerful nation at that time, the British Crown, after a profuse flow of blood, to concede to the inevitable and allow all those up and down the Eastern Seaboard to become the United States of America (not that we've always been that ever since or even are that on most days in recent memory).

At any given moment, many of those in uniform serving down the block or across a continent can be called upon to run towards whatever danger we, as a nation, face with no thought for themselves or their own families and loved ones. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day and allow all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault they withstand.

It's a dangerous world with new ways of war but those making the sacrifice to protect us are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at Forward Operating Bases marked with dots on maps of countries we cannot name but all who whet the blade of the sword they wield in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

And while it's hard sometimes to see the line from the Battle of Lexington to the traffic on New York's Lexington Avenue and from the farmers' fields, crowded urban landscapes, and the splendid isolation of wooded lowlands to the marbled halls of the seat of government in the District of Columbia, it's all a part of what every veteran made possible with their service.

We are more filled with self-doubt as a nation than at any time in the last six or more decades. There will always be light and dark, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now, or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude we will always be worthy of their sacrifice. 
-bill kenny

A Victory Lap for a Real Victory

I wrote this twelve years ago to celebrate the Fall of the Berlin Wall on this date in 1989. For a moment, and not a lot longer than that, I actually hoped we had turned a corner as a world and that bigger and better things were just ahead. Obviously, I'd never be successful as The Amazing Randi or even Madame Marie when it comes to future forecasting. <Sigh>

When I first offered this back in 2009, I called it:

Only the One in Our Hearts and Minds Remains

It's almost already Tuesday in Germany (depending on when you read this) and that means observances celebrating the Fall of the Berlin Wall should be in full swing. 

As one of about twenty-five percent of all Americans who ever served in the US Armed Forces, I had the opportunity to be stationed, and live, in what was called West Germany. I was there as the Evil Empire, Warsaw Pact, call it what you will imploded and went out of business, starting at Bornholmer Strasse (I have a piece of The Wall in my basement. I've never known what to do with it, but I'll never get rid of it.). I remember it as a rare moment when I truly thought we could do anything we set our minds to.

I've saved this note for quite some time, as my secret treasure and pleasure, because I now live many thousands of miles away from Berlin and Germany, just Germany (no East or West) in an area where many of my neighbors consider a trip to a foreign land as akin to a journey to Disneyland. 

We're such a large country, sprawling in all directions, with so many different kinds of people, we see the rest of the world more often than we should as a sideshow. I once read where in New York City, alone, there are more people of Irish descent than live in Dublin, the capital of Eire, and more people who claim Jewish ancestry than in Tel Aviv. I wouldn't be surprised to learn in the Bronx there are more Who's than in all of Whoville.

It stands to reason, and mathematics, we have more people with German bloodlines than live in Der Vaterland (though they love their muttis, make no mistake-Germany is a Fatherland) and so perhaps across this country today there will be some notice of events from damals and their impact on heute. 

Unless, of course, one of the Kardashian children does something (anything), or one of the other media prima ballerinas attracts a camera (they're like pandas in the zoo. You've seen 'em, I've seen 'em. They don't actually do anything but we stand and stare at them for hours. What's the matter with us?). Yeah, I'm not sanguine that we'll look up and see the sky.

My two children, both now adults approaching middle age, were much younger when the country of their birth took its first, halting steps towards reunification. I don't know how much of it they remember as I've never asked but they exist because their father found himself a guest in their mother's country and then he found their mother and together they found a family. 

I've read where we each are the sum of everyone we've ever met and if only because the fall of The Wall expanded the pool, it would be memorable and historical. I'll always have the movie in my head of the Trabants that rolled down the A3, south of Frankfurt towards Heidelberg.

That the end of a divided Germany put an exclamation mark at the stunning acceleration of events that resulted in The Death of Communism, I leave to the brilliant P. J. O'Rourke to write about and hope you enjoy. 

Today, spare a thought for a moment when the world grew larger, and smaller, simultaneously--when the Good Guys won and a lot of people who had never had anything to smile about learned to laugh. We could do it again, and do it today (and every day) and, believe me, it would never get old because for someone, somewhere, the next time will always be the first time.
-bill kenny