This time next week it'll be next year. Growing up, as a school kid and later as a working adult (or my impression of one) I always found this week, 'between the years' hardest to manage.. Should we look back at the year coming to a close even as we are living it or do we start to lean forward in anticipation of what's to come?
Without intending to harsh your buzz in light of the last couple of years, I'm afraid the looking forward idea is fraught with more than just a little disappointment and danger. This time a year ago, we thought we were continuing an ascent from the depths of the despair of COVID and as we traded our caution and concern for quiet optimism only to find ourselves with an accelerated rate of inflation that hollowed out our savings as well as our resolve to work together to rebuild better.
We went from E Pluribus Unum to Don't Touch Mine and from reflexively lending a hand to those in need to rolling up car windows and locking the doors when stopped at an intersection anywhere in Norwich lest someone with a cardboard sign gets too close for comfort.
I'm not sure when the war on poverty turned into an attack on the poor but here we are. Waiting for the light to change and trying not to make eye contact with someone so far down on their luck that standing in the winter's cold for hours on end is all they think they have left.
One of those recurring year-end promises we make is to be more generous to those social agencies reaching out to people we call 'less fortunate?' How sobered and saddened should we be that in a year's time the number of 'less fortunate' has continued to grow and the short-staffed and under-funded helping hands are struggling to empty an ocean of despair and heartache with a teaspoon?
I'm at an age where my efforts are feeble and my talents are mostly imaginary (and the older I get, the better I was) so I do what I can by contributing money to those agencies trying to help, and the operative word so often is 'trying.'
For me, more often than that not means donating to the Connecticut Food Share, the Gemma E. Moran United Way/Labor Food Center, and St. Vincent de Paul Place because it's unconscionable if not obscene that in a nation with an obesity epidemic (over 40% of us older than 20 are overweight) while we have thirty-four million people, to include nine million children, who are food insecure (a very fancy way of saying we don't know where our next meal is coming from).
Times are hard for more of us now than in recent memory and anyone struggling as the cost of living especially utilities continues to escalate faces a choice between heat or eat which is no choice at all. We all know someone who needs a hand up, be it a neighbor, a co-worker, or a family member. As we say farewell to the old year and look forward to Sunday's arrival of 2023, let's extend and expand our generosity to reflect both our spirit and our wallet so that we all start the New Year better than we ended this one. Happy New Year!
-bill kenny
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