Happy Birthday to US(A)

Today is Independence Day which should be the standard against which we hold ourselves, as citizens of this country and as citizens of the world, every day and not some kind of an excuse to get 20% off at the Mall, buy a keg, and have a barbecue with a grill that's crying like a fire in the sun. 

A hundred and sixty-plus years ago we were still struggling with the aftermath of a fratricidal war that ended slavery in the USA, and have tried, fitfully, at times to move on with ourselves and our lives. 

In many ways who we are now is what we were then as that war propelled us fully into the Industrial Age, whose Revolution had begun twenty years earlier, and helped move us towards a more open and larger engagement with the rest of the world until we had achieved Pax Americana, that started some eighty years after Appomattox.

Many have sacrificed much so that we can be who we are--and many are away from home today, far from home, because those who wish us harm don't take holidays and as a famous Chicagoan (no, not Ernie Banks) so eloquently explained decades ago, you get more with kind words and a gun than you do with kind words alone. 

Men and women in uniform, no matter their personal politics and feelings, would agree that growing faint when confronted by the evil in the world will not deter or distract it. It must be confronted or it will consume everyone and everything, including those who think fretting about our democracy is more noble than struggling to protect it. 

As you enjoy this holiday, please spare a moment for all those, past, present, and future, whose service and sacrifice make it possible. And I'll meet you further on up the road. 
-bill kenny

Singing an American Tune

We're thisclose to Independence Day which technically is tomorrow but, of course, in various ways, will be celebrated for at least a three-day weekend, assuming some of us haven’t already gotten a head start. Not intending to sound like a scold, but I am good at it, I wanted to offer some thoughts I’ve shared in previous years as we begin our celebrations.

A lot of us will cook raw meat over hot rocks, quaff malt, and barley beverages, play whiffle ball in the backyard, or just take it easy.  I believe, even those who gave their lives in the course of the wars fought for, in, and by this nation, wouldn't have a problem flipping a burger, draining a cold glass, or pitching an inning or two and letting it go at that. 

In a country where more and more and more of us identify politically as just red (Republican) or just blue (Democrat), with the other side always under suspicion, this holiday could be a much-needed reminder that two hundred and forty-eight years ago, patriots saw themselves as red, white, and blue. 

And tomorrow while we celebrate one of the world’s most inspiring documents, our Declaration of Independence, we can also do some long-overdue self-assessment and soul-searching as we ponder where we should be heading as a nation.

We’ve traded ‘e Pluribus Unum,’ (from many, one) to 'what's mine is mine, but what's yours is negotiable' even while promising one another over the next few days to think about those whose service in uniform makes what we call ‘the American Way of Life’ possible for many, but not all, of us.

There’s a line in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, right after those self-evident truths, which sets us apart from every other nation; where we proclaim each of us has “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In a perfect world, we should have devoted every day of the succeeding two hundred and forty-eight years that followed to expanding the definition of who exactly had those unalienable rights but along the way we’ve gotten sidetracked on our journey from the streets of Philadelphia in the heat of the summer of 1776 to the cities and towns of all sizes across our nation right now.

Quite frankly, unless and until we all share equally in those unalienable rights of ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness’ we are lying to ourselves. We are the Shining City on the Hill, as Peggy Noonan once phrased it, for the rest of the world and from this nation’s birth, people have come from everywhere to live free, proud to be called an ‘American.’ 

We who have always lived in this society and enjoyed the protections our Declaration of Independence promised, and our Constitution and Bill of Rights guaranteed sometimes are blinded by our own good fortune and fail to see those among us who have been marginalized, disenfranchised, and deprived of what we’ve told one another is our birthright.

Freedom to be whomever we choose to be while acknowledging the happiness, joyfulness, and safety resulting from that freedom, is not intended just for some but for all of us. Freedom isn’t a pie that’s made smaller when it’s shared. It increases when more of us enjoy its blessings. Always.

Happy Independence Day to each of us and all of us as our inheritance as free people.
-bill kenny

Some Old Dust

I'm not taking a Fourth of July holiday break so stop hoping for that. What I am doing in the spirit of the holiday is sharing something I wrote not long ago and not just because my last original idea died of loneliness. I called it:

America Is a Dream the Whole World Owns

There are a lot of traditional activities for Independence Day, not that reading these words is in any danger of becoming part of that, and if you've heard me write some of this before, you've been standing too close to the keyboard. 

Before it gets really crazy busy over the next few days with holiday preparations perhaps each of us should look in the mirror and then take a look around at the country we received from our parents and their parents and which we hope to give to our children and theirs. 

There’s been as much gained as there has been lost through the tears and years and some of what has changed has been better and some of it has only been different. The dilemma is in deciding which and what.

By many accounts the heat was oppressive and tempers were hot in Philadelphia two hundred and forty-eight years ago as malcontents and troublemakers (in the eyes of His Majesty, George III, King of England) gathered to refine, define, and catalog their grievances and complaints with the most powerful empire the world had ever seen.

Articulating what they called our ‘unalienable rights’ to include ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ the founders of our republic, who did not agree on very much except that the present state of affairs such as they were in 1776 could not continue, concluded the only way forward as a people on this largely unexplored, new continent whose size and wealth was not yet known, was to break with the past and declare independence from King and Crown.

And out of all of that has come all of this. 

And along the way, the original magic and meaning have been muffled by backyard pool parties, holiday car sales, and chicken fried steaks on the barbecue.

Our politics is spirited even if our interest isn't; we confuse partisan and patriot far too frequently and our understanding of issues is muddled and muddied because too many of us have created media echo chambers where all we ever hear/see and read is what we choose, not what we should. 

And, again, it’s not that we all agree with who we are and what we are doing. It’s been reported we haven’t been this divided morally, politically, and socially as a country since the Civil War. And that should frighten us more than it does and galvanize us into redoubling our efforts to reach out to one another, and yet we continue to shrug our shoulders.

Some say never have so many had so much of life’s material rewards but others contend that never have so many struggled to hold on to what they have. There's a lot to be said on both sides of that argument and there’s even more that we're not hearing because we’re just not very good anymore at listening to one another.

What may be missing in our nation is our sense of self, our confidence and belief in our own abilities to forever adopt, adapt and overcome. We had those traits at our Founding and I would hope each, in our own way, might again rediscover them, both for those whose inheritance we are and for those whose promise is yet to be.
-bill kenny

Deep in the Darkest Hour (Nearly)

Driving home yesterday afternoon from the supermarket, I was behind a car with a bumper sticker reading, "War Is Not the Answer."

Sorry, and with all due respect to Marvin, what if the question is "What band was Eric Burdon in after he left The Animals?" It could be the answer....or how about "What does raw backwards spell?" Life is not as simple as a bumper sticker, though when you watch most of our elections for the last lifetime or so, you can be forgiven for thinking otherwise.

Truth to tell, the bumper sticker and our current political malaise help me understand why the speed of light is faster than the speed of sound: many people look intelligent until you hear them speak. 

It's up there with "Live simply so that others may simply live." Oh yeah, the car bumper I saw that one on was attached to an MB Gelandewagen.

Years ago a NYC radio station heavily promoted the slogan "Love is the Answer" until a cross-town rival offered the missing question, "What can you fall into that doesn't stick to your face?" Such are the wages of sin for a PBS mind in a Fox News World. Yeah, and did you see the moon last night, hung like a Chinese ball?

-bill kenny