The new year has started; the race has begun yet again. What do you have as a balance when you draw the line under the Year 2024? A foggy memory or two of happy times and/or how bad things had been with the always-present hope/belief that the coming year would be better. Yeah. How did that work out?
At some point in the future, some of us may see these as the Good Old Days. At the moment, that seems pretty far-fetched to me. Doesn't it feel like we've been running in place in a bowl of oatmeal? We're not even leaving a hole with each footfall, It just fills in as quickly as we lift our heel up and out to place it forward again.
I should apologize if I'm harshing your buzz but I just want to make sure all of us calculate the total cost of a lifestyle that, for us in recent years may have seemed to grow harder, but is still the desire and dream of many people all around the world. And don't think for a minute whatever we've paid is too much because it isn't, but if we're alive to write this and read it, we've gotten off light.
We began as a place of refuge in locales as diverse as Virginia and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, becoming thirteen settlements hugging the Atlantic Coast. It took us a century, and more, to cross the Mississippi, reach the Pacific Northwest, the Great Southwest, the coast of California, and to both the Aleutian and the Hawaiian Islands.
We fought natives, the British, one another, and too many others as we reinvented ourselves to reflect people of every race, color, and creed. It wasn't easy and was often less than popular but it was always the right thing to do.
Around the world today and every day, we have the flower of a generation, the crown of creation, whatever turn of phrase you come up with to make yourself feel good about people whose reports of service take up seconds a night on the evening news squared off against as implacable a foe as this nation has faced in its history, and many of us don't know, don't care and/or don't want to know. In case, you thought their sacrifice was forgotten because it seemed to be hidden, it wasn't. You, too are a witness.
No one steps into the same river twice as you and the river have both changed. For all whose final act of 2024 was the forfeiture of their lives in defense of ours, let's promise one another to all do better, together, here in this brave new year.
-bill kenny
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