To Joe, from Bill

Dear President Biden,

Greetings from Norwich, Connecticut, the Rose of New England from one of her pointier thorns. 

With tomorrow being Saint Patrick's Day and Sunday's calendar telling me it's the first day of spring, I'm hoping as I'm sure you are, too, that the (second consecutive) winter of our discontent is ending.

We stole a march, literally and figuratively, on most of the rest of the nation with our Saint Patrick's Parade a week ago Sunday under cloudy but not threatening skies with warmer than we're used to and probably deserve temperatures for March, and I'm hoping we've seen the last or nearly the last of the snow and ice. I mention that for a reason. 

I had oil delivered to our house last Monday, not that we have a squeaky boiler but because we use oil for heat, and the price had gone up ten cents a gallon per day every day for the ten days since the previous delivery. Between us, I'm not looking forward to the next delivery.

I know I'm not alone in Norwich or across the Northeast, where the cost of heating your house, be it oil, electricity, or gas (natural or propane) has gone from a cause of concern to now one of alarm. You get briefed on this stuff all the time, so consider me a little subtext on that PowerPoint slide. 

And you don't need me to tell you about the price of gasoline. But you know what? Last night, I slept in a warm bed. got up this morning and had breakfast. I'm not spending the day, an ocean and half a continent away in Ukraine trying to stop T-14 Armata Russian Army battle tanks with thoughts and prayers, digging through the rubble of what was my house trying to find my child, or struggling to escape the ferocity of a war thrust upon me. It's sobering to watch Ukrainians defending their capital practically with their bare hands while realizing fourteen months ago we had Trumpers and Traitors attacking ours. 

Meanwhile, on some, though by no means all, media platforms, a great deal of time and effort was devoted to something called a Freedom Convoy that I thought (hoped might be a better word) at first was responding to the events in Ukraine but since my view of the world is shaped by the windows through which I view it, yet again, I had the wrong end of the stick. 

The Freedom Convoy was as much a protest as it was a parade of grievances, real and imagined, celebrating the participants' victimhood and perceived oppression from COVID-19 preventative efforts and measures that, despite deployment across our country, still could not keep, as of this writing, nearly a million of us from dying. 

I think I understood the 'what' behind the Freedom Convoy, but since most, if not all the measures they objected to had been rescinded some ten days to two weeks ago, I'm not sure I grasped the 'why.' That they repeatedly looped The Capital Beltway in a miles-long column to press their demands seemed, at least to me, to illustrate a definition of circle jerk with which I was previously unfamiliar.      

You don't have an easy job right now, Mr. President, as our leader and I'm thinking neither do we as those relying on your leadership. As a similarly-beleaguered Chief Executive, Harry Truman, observed, "Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better."
-bill kenny