Hiding from the Weather

After what seemed to be a very hot, humid, and cranky summer, Fall arrived in New England this past Thursday morning. At least for part of that day and earlier today, rain and cooler temperatures coupled with dark skies made you realize the seasons had, indeed, changed.

I've been noticing the daylight is a little later in arriving and departing a few moments sooner every day. I appreciate the calendar making it official, but I already knew the seasons were changing, and I'm not a big fan of the part of the year we're entering. I don't dislike autumn so much as dread what follows.

But there will be some marvelous days between then and now-bracing mornings, gorgeous foliage, crisp evenings, and I hope that where you are, you and yours have much the same, and more. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

-bill kenny

No Idea What It Means

When I woke up, there it was. 

Μασώμενο Παιχνίδι των Θεών

Chew Toy of the Gods. 

You're welcome, I think.
-bill kenny

No Starch

Belief is a wonderful thing. It's not better than pony rides for your birthday, admittedly, but it's powerful stuff and can get you through some, if not all, pretty hard times. 

I have, in my dotage, worked harder to be a happy idiot, succeeding at least in the latter part of that endeavor. I will attempt to see the brighter side of a double homicide, given the opportunity (unless I'm part of it).

Given lemons, I not only can make lemonade, but I'll build you a two-story condo out of lemon peel with a detached garage made of rind and a backyard spa for under 249K, complete with a full basement. Volume is the answer to your 'how can you do it?' question. You're welcome is the response to your thank you. Moving right along...

I think insistence on seeing the Lighter Side of this Cosmic Joke has helped me more than it has harmed, but it's tiring to try to be so cheerful so often, so when I can get some help, I'm more than grateful. 

And if all I ever get from this is a song I can hear, playing right in my ear, but I can't sing it, and yet I can't help listening, that's fine too. I've always loved words and extra starch. Back by Tuesday.

-bill kenny

Irish Alzheimer's

Based on a nearly-true story.

I still think that somehow I can blame Biden.
-bill kenny

Seconds Out

I mentioned last week that my wife had contracted COVID. Thursday evening, a visit to our walk-in clinic confirmed that I have it as well.

Both of us have several co-morbidities, as our doctors might say. 

None of which are mollified or pacified by a nepo baby as Health and Human Services Secretary who speaks batshit gibberish in a voice so scratchy it makes my throat hurt listening to him talk.

We're recovering because we've had every single dose of the COVID vaccine we were offered. And we will continue to do so.
-bill kenny 

Start or Stop

It happens on a regular cycle, so there's really no reason to be surprised. Usually, within a fortnight of Labor Day, we have a shift in the weather, and the heat and humidity depart, not before dumping a large amount of rain in a short amount of time on the just and the unjust, and the leaves start to turn, and the lawn signs start to spring up.

National elections, where we choose a President, consume oceans of ink. But it's where the road and the sky collide, here at the local level, that the real issues in search of answers get decided. And the only history that gets written is what we choose to write. We can wound with words.

We look at politicians in D.C. or in Hartford as an abstraction, and more often than not, we're right, but those who seek office inside the city limits are our neighbors and acquaintances, if not friends. We can put names to faces and faces to positions on issues that affect us immediately. Our families see one another in the market, at a local community event, or just out for a walk on the weekend.

It's pretty easy for most of us politically to tell a Mike Johnson from a Chris Murphy, even from a distance, but when we're looking for leadership in Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, the nuances and differences are more subtle.

It's more a question of degree than dogma, and that's as it should be because this is where we all live, emphasis on the all. Decisions made 'for the common good' really mean for everyone on both sides of the street, up and down the block. And when less than a quarter of all registered voters turn out to cast a ballot, leading starts to resemble shepherding cats.

The Grateful Dead once observed, ‘What a long, strange trip it’s been.’ Amen to that. We thought this time last year was pretty tough and hoped by now we’d be seeing some daylight. Cheer up, the pundits said; things could get worse. So we did, and they did get worse.

I don't pretend to know what has gone wrong or how to fix it, but I doubt demonizing the other guys in DC, belittling the Governor, or polluting the blogosphere with innuendo and insinuation when community leaders prove to be all-too fallible and frail humans is helping.

It most certainly is NOT who we have been since the founding of the Republic. High times on Wall Street and hard times on Main Street. Maybe we don’t need new solutions so much as we need a return to our oldest and truest values.

-bill kenny

Closing the Gate

This is the last summer Sunday of 2025. Back when I was a wee slip of a lad, summers seemed to go on forever. We used to spring out of bed to better get a head start on doing absolutely nothing until late in the afternoon, when, with a little luck, a marathon baseball game would break out on the dirt field up the street from the Girard's house. 

No one kept score, and nobody cared who won or lost. Players would come and go for hours, heading home for dinner or to go shopping with Mom, and then return hours later, sometimes having to be on the other team.

Usually, what we did, depending on how good the player returning really was, he would have to wait to rejoin the game until another player showed up to balance him out. Mid-inning trades were also not unknown. The games went on until the daylight was dying or, more correctly, had died, and then Mr. Girard would back his car out of the carport and turn the headlights on to wash over the field so we could wrap it finally (until tomorrow when it began again).

We did this for years until someone bought the lot and built a house on it. We all hated the people who moved in to live there. And, much later, when the house burned down, I felt a twinge of guilt even though I had nothing to do with what happened-the power of wishing and its consequences, I guess.

As I got older, the summers got shorter, and when our Pat and Mike were smaller, it was fun to watch the cycle begin again with them. We're nearing the 'leaf peeping' that everyone associates with New England weekends in the fall. But for me, it's already too late. 

I hate autumn-I can smell the scent of all things dying even before they actually do, and I'm left with memories of the summer to get me through the winter into the following spring. Enjoy what you have, while you have it.
-bill kenny

An Evergreen...

 ...of a bad joke.

A recession is when you have difficulty finding a job.

A depression is when I do.

Wall Street versus Main Street.
You don't need a dime to call someone who cares; the payphones are all gone.
-bill kenny

Maybe Too Inside Baseball

When I arrived at the American Forces Network Europe Headquarters at Bertramstrasse 6, 6000 Frankfurt am Main, Bundesrepublik Deutschland, as a skeeter wing (Airman with one chevron) in the early autumn of 1976, I had the good fortune of working for a very kind, somewhat eccentric but entirely brilliant former commercial ad executive and US Army band musician, Bob M. 

The latter point is integral to today's tangent. I worked for Bob in Radio Command Information, the in-house production operation responsible for creating the public service announcements (PSAs) instead of commercials that were broadcast on our radio and TV airwaves.      

Many times, one of us on the staff would produce from whole cloth a campaign at the request of one of the plethora of Department of Defense activities we supported. Many other times, Bob would invent the campaign himself, and one of us would supply the voice.

Our audience and client list numbered, I'm guessing, almost fifty years on, into the hundreds of thousands, not counting the local national listeners (whom we knew were out there but we called the 'shadow audience'). There was never a dull moment, no matter how yearned for that might have been. 

Our days were spent, if not happily, then at least dry and warm, cranking out PSA's on everything from shopping in the Stars & Stripes bookstore, through booking a day trip with Information, Tours, & Travel, to seat belt safety and anything/everything in between. 

For me, the most memorable was the annual reunion of (usually US Army officer) graduates of Texas Agriculture and Mining, better known as Texas A & M. Rik Delisle, even then Der alte Ami, and our section leader, was tapped by Bob for what was called 'The Aggie Roundup,' which of course (?) had to include their fight song. To this day, I suspect Rik can hear it in his sleep.   

I thought of all that because of this. And, yeah, Ay Ziggy Zoomba is a close second to the Aggie War Hymn. I know, "today was a long walk," but you had a beautiful view, right?
-bill kenny

Blinders Optional

I wandered down Saturday afternoon from near Chelsea Parade, where we live, to Howard Brown Park for the return of the Taste of Italy. Thanks to the organizers, sponsors, volunteers, vendors, and everyone else who worked so hard to make it all happen. It was a lot of fun, a day where the weather threatened but never delivered, and a delicious experience. 

Its success helps underscore a fundamental point I strive to the point of irritation of others to make: offer people a reason to come to downtown Norwich and they will, because they did on Saturday in droves.

We spend a lot of time in Norwich waiting for 'them' to do something (the something seems to vary from person to person, but is rarely the same across any segment of our population). And then we wonder why it's hard to get anything accomplished. 

Walking from Chelsea Parade down Washington Street towards Brown Park, the litter along the curb runs almost the length of the street. As a matter of fact, almost anywhere you look in Norwich, there's trash at the curb, on the sidewalks and front lawns, or in the streets. 

Some of it happens because when the trash and recycling boxes are emptied and detritus falls on the ground, no one picks it up. We don't need a 'them' to put trash in its place, but if each of us picked up one piece of junk every day, we'd soon have a handle on the litter.

And good luck walking on the sidewalks across from the former Buckingham School all the way to the Sweeney Bridge because they are a nightmare and a safety hazard. All the broken concrete allows weeds and other flora and fauna to grow wild, adding that 'untamed' flavor that urban planners say is so important in modern downtowns these days. 

Actually, there are portions of sidewalk on both sides of Washington that are practically impassable. Berserk bushes, overgrown shrubbery, household garbage, broken glass, discarded fast food containers, dirty diapers, the flotsam and jetsam of life in the 21st Century, strewn like so much junk all across the horizon.

And we don't even see it anymore.
We've become inured to the thousands of discarded cigarette butts near the pedestrian islands across from the Flat Iron building. The next time you're out walking downtown, check them out for yourself. I'm sure they will still be there. 

Squaring away our sidewalks and side streets would take thirty minutes, probably less, out of our week, but we've decided it's not our job to make where we live a better and nicer place to be. We'd rather complain about what we don't have rather than conserve and preserve what we do. Maybe we're afraid we're just not worth the effort. And maybe we're right.

-bill kenny

Like a River Full of Gravity

I wear a lot of T-shirts with a pocket. I don't understand shirts, or any article of outer clothing, that doesn't have pockets (perhaps socks could be the exception). Where else am I to keep all of the fun otherwise?

I have some spiffy sport shirts, and at least one with the guy on the horse, in my wardrobe at the moment. I don't have any of the shirts that feature an alligator, or one with an alligator eating a guy on a horse (I think we'd both remember that one). And while I used to have a lot of rock and roll T-shirts, most of the folks I used to listen to are disbanded or deceased (making me the winner, I think).

I'm not a fan of the 'clever sayings' T-shirts, though I suspect they have a more official-sounding name than that. I find very few of the things folks have on their chest, or lower, and/or back to be thigh-slappingly funny. I see a lot of people of both sexes (or should I say 'of all sexes'?) at the gym in shirts and outfits that really make me feel every day of my seven-plus decades. And one of the reasons I've stopped going.

I recall two guys wandering into the facility while I was cursing the treadmill in the kind of clothes that lead you to believe their households are governed by that 'first one up is best one dressed' rule, and they are late sleepers. On the front of the one guy's black tee shirt in white letters was "Weakness is for Tussies" but with a P instead of a T. On the back was "Balls to the Wall" (without a second S for wall).

The other fellow's shirt back had "Train Like a Maniac," and when he turned around, he had what appeared to be a self-portrait of himself on the front, under his chin. And people wonder why I insist on earpieces and listening to music on my cell phone. I am now so rude that when people speak to me, I NEVER remove the earpieces, but just repeat over and over again, 'I won't hear you, I won't hear you.' Some think I should say can't, but I've chosen that verb deliberately.

I actually do have a shirt with a slogan. I got it years ago, and it's still true. People smile when they read it, though they shouldn't. It says, "I probably don't like you either." In light of how my curmudgeon reputation is spreading, it might be useful to get a shirt with my name and address on one side and 'other side up' to go with it. And then hope all those folks from the Literacy Volunteers keep their funding.
-bill kenny

Brainworms and Billionaires

Congratulations, Bobby Junior. NOW you have my attention. 

Ruining our Health and Human Services with outlandish tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracies and management philosophies borrowed from the Q-Anon playbook. Vaccines for childhood diseases. Tylenol causes  autism (but was developed after autism was first identified). Cutbacks in cancer research. 

When did we make "How Stupid Are You?" into a 'Hold My Beer' contest? 

On every single issue of public health, you manage to come down on the wrong side. Why not let what's left of that worm in your brain have some equal time? It can't be any more stupid and ignorant than you already are. 

As for your lies about 'we were lied to about COVID,' my wife now has COVID. Guess who I'm holding accountable, Scumbag?
-bill kenny

Even the Birds Are Chained to the Sky

We have a forsythia bush in our side yard, near our kitchen, that we planted long ago. It tends to get wildly overgrown in the summer months. My wife is planning to trim it short, back, and sides in the coming weeks. When I'm having my morning coffee during the spring and summer, I can watch sparrows who shelter in it.

I don't know where they nest, and I've never seen sparrow eggs. I have seen their chicks as the parents, probably the mother, I'm guessing, feed them, and I marvel at how insatiable they are. And so confident! They expect to be fed as if it were the most normal thing in nature, and they are. 

This time of year, the leaves on the forsythia turn brown and fall off, leaving more and more bare branches. I watched as a lone sparrow hopped from branch to branch, trying to bury itself in the remaining leaves to little avail.

There's a host of sparrows (I had to look that up) who live in the ivy growing up the outside of the chimney of the house on the other side of the deteriorating brick wall that separates my property from theirs. It, too, is losing its leaves so the birds will need more permanent protection from the elements as the fall gives way, inexorably, to winter.

I don't know if the sparrows 'know' winter is coming or just sense it, so I'm not clear if they can reason their way to realizing spring follows winter. To be honest, some days I'm not sure if I realize it. I know they don't migrate and brave the blasts and snow just like the rest of us. 

I wonder if they know who Bob Dylan is and that he sang of them long ago. Maybe that's why they stick around.
-bill kenny 

Comfortably Numb

Driving through the Norwichtown Commons the other day on my way to the Stop & Shop grocery store, I passed someone drawing just one more puff from her cigarette before entering the Planet Fitness, which is also in the Commons.  

I smoked two/three packs of cigarettes a day for twenty-two (plus) years and have my own definitions of insanity and dependence, as does each of us with a vice, but for Kafkaesque humor, you'd have to go some to top that. I'm thinking perhaps trying to wolf down a Häagen-Dazs giant ice cream cone before crossing the threshold into the fitness center, assuming the H-D guys are still in business and make such an item.

We like the routine, the assurance of the rote drill (I think), and maybe that's where we believe the benefit accrues. It's like small children learning the Pledge of Allegiance long before they have any idea what allegiance means (for some of us, that's true through old age). A whole generation now hits the fitness centers in the same way previous ones frequented the bars and clubs on Saturday nights or the churches on the Sunday mornings that followed.

But for what purpose, and to what end? Behaviorists refer to the ongoing Obesity epidemic in the United States. It surfaces for its fifteen minutes on social media platforms and television news reports, and then we have another double colestro-and-bacon burger from the neighborhood drive-in in and don't forget to supersize the fries, and, what?-Oh yeah, the drink? Gimme a Diet Coke, no ice.

I'm wondering if we're not better off just eliminating the middleman and cutting out the white space. Put a cigar bar in the fitness center--or set up one of those luxurious dessert places in the lobby; call it "Cool Whip and Curls", no one will snicker. Those who wish to indulge can, and the rest of us can pretend to not see any of it, as it'll all be out of sight. 

Look at how often we've used that trick to handle world events that should and could have numbed us. Besides, it keeps us from walking around with our eyes closed-people can get hurt going through life like that.
-bill kenny

You Don't Seem to Notice

The best thing about being a pessimist is that you can only be surprised, and never disappointed. For reasons that predate my arrival in The Rose City, many of us living here wear a coat of disappointment as a sort of shield, lest we get too excited or happy about a possibility working out for the best. 

Some of us seem to enjoy living in a world with little more than varying shades of gray or choosing to not make choices, unaware that by choosing NOT to decide, we still have made a choice and that choice has consequences we often fail to see, or to see in time.

Because we've spent so many years struggling to manage economic development the way a horse runs, looking no more than one footfall in advance of where we are, we've allowed ourselves to be managed by events rather than mastering them. 

As another school year begins for those with children in Norwich Public Schools, we are seeing in classrooms across our city proof that our myopic perspective is limiting our children's horizons and our own possibilities for improvement.

Collateral damage in our continued inability to enhance revenue streams and increase the Grand List has been the death by degrees of many of the school enrichment initiatives that some of our older children had when they were students. Quite frankly, the reductions the Board of Education needed to make, because the money simply wasn't there, went beyond any pretense of 'fat' and cut to the bone.

The size of the classes has changed, the staff available in the schools is smaller, and the limitless possibilities that a quality education is supposed to provide every child at every desk in every school have been sharply reduced. We are a city sending children in the primary grades into schools that lack the tools and talent to enable them to fully succeed, and it's not going to get better in the immediate future.

So that I'm clear, this isn't going to be a tough year for our children--this is another year in what will be a tough life. As Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel write about in 21st Century Skills "(o)ur current Knowledge Age is quickly giving way to an Innovation Age, where the ability to solve problems in new ways...and invent entirely new industries will all be highly prized." 

But if our children are to be in the wave, creating new ideas and offering fresh solutions to local and global problems, we'll need to prepare them better than we're doing and perhaps better than we're able, at least right now.

As is so often the case, there are no quick fixes, no drive-by solutions or instant corrections--to provide our children with the greatest of all gifts, a brighter future. 

This November election cycle, if you think that because you don't have school-age children, you have no stake in this effort, then this would be the moment to rethink that assumption. The time to question everything will be here in a moment; brace for impact.

-bill kenny

Nothing a Night's Sleep Won't Cure

Talk about putting the tire in tired. 

I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted.
-bill kenny

Shrinking the Wolf

My mind can sometimes be a projectionist's fever dream as a panoply of cross-generational imagery, historical, hysterical, some mine and some from before my time, coalesce and collide unbidden and unwanted. I can't watch, but I can't look away either.

There's a photo from the Spanish Civil War, depicting the moment of death of a Loyalist soldier whose name I did not know for decades. It's chased by the jumpy, silent footage of Zapruder's film as President Kennedy's head explodes from the impact of a bullet.

There are the grainy picture postcards from a long-ago, hard-fought and hastily forgotten war (though not by those who were sent to fight it), the first of one man executing another, while in the second, a naked child literally runs for her life.

All of those images pale when recalling street-level video of a brilliantly blue heaven over a lower Manhattan skyline on September 11, 2001 and the startling and sudden appearance of a commercial airliner entering one of the Twin Towers about two thirds of the way up, disappearing inside, forever, while the mind struggles to process what the eyes and neural network have shared. And there's this one that breaks my heart every time I look at it.

Who among us doesn't have a story about where they were when they first learned of the attacks on 9/11? Nearly every story that can be told by this, the twenty-fourth anniversary of those attacks, has been told. The shock and horror never dull, no matter how often the tale is told. It sometimes felt as if history stopped at the moment when the first plane impacted. And when time began again, the Age of Innocent Ignorance was over, and that of the Dark Hard World had begun.

The attacks of 9/11 created for every American, regardless of race, creed, politics, sexual persuasion, or color, including those not yet born, a shared memory in which pre 9/11 America becomes almost mythical.

As often as we speak about the way we were before 9/11, there's a strange quiet when we talk of what has happened in its wake. We talk in abstractions about the Global War on Terror and of the thousands and tens of thousands of men and women in uniform deployed across the world in defense of freedoms we too often take for granted here on the home front.

We'll offer thoughts for the victims of 9/11, but to better understand the price of freedom, perhaps we should visit the memorial at Chelsea Parade to remember the selfless service and sacrifice of Norwich residents Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, who died during Operation Iraqi Freedom. 

Their memorial is just a few steps from Norwich Free Academy, where both were students. In such a way does the circle remain unbroken in remembering two young men who ran towards, not from, danger when their nation most needed them because they realized courage is not the absence of fear, but, rather, something more important than fear.

There's a German proverb, "fear makes the wolf bigger than he is." There are already too many wolves in our world without creating more. As Franklin Roosevelt offered to a very different America in a very perilous time, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified, terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."

We honor Jacob Martir-Guiterrez and Keith Heidtman, not just today, the anniversary of 9/11, but every day, by living fearlessly and out loud and to help one another become better people.

-bill kenny

Not Forgotten

Tomorrow is the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon (and Shanksville, Pennsylvania). Torrents of words have been, and will be, written about a day burned into the memory of the world. 

These words are not part of that but, rather, a remembrance of a different anniversary also tomorrow, September 11, but in 1982, in Mannheim, (West) Germany. Two colleagues, Private First Class Bruce Scott, US Army, and Senior Airman Michael Sutton, US Air Force, were among the forty-six persons who perished when a U. S. Army CH-47C "Chinook" helicopter crashed. 

They were very young, as were we all back then, with their careers and lives before them. I work hard to remember them at this time every year, and the hole that will never heal that their absence left forever in the hearts of their family and friends.

-bill kenny 

Thinking about the Other Bruce

Mortality is a tricky thing. We all know, or should, that we will someday die, but when we're forced to focus on that someday and realize the bell will toll specifically for each of us, it gets more than a little tense. 

My family and I are wrestling with that situation right now as I face some decisions (not all within my control) about my health that I would much rather have been theoretical, and which have caused me to become my wife's patient instead of her partner.   

As Tony Soprano so sagaciously observed, 'Every day is a gift, but does it have to be a pair of socks?" Turns out, we're a short time here and a long time gone.
-bill kenny

Devils and Dust

This time Thursday, we will be talking about the twenty-fourth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11. We have a generation growing old that has never known what our nation was like before the attacks.

We will relive every moment of every memory that got us here. Where we go after that, I don't know. I've spent the last couple of days trying to sort out the previous score of years, aware I'm a long way from home, attempting a return to the familiar and the known, even when the sky is bible-black and the direction unknown.

It feels like a dream remembering when the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union and its vassal states imploded. So many of us rushed into the streets to celebrate being alive at that historic moment with total strangers who were celebrating the very same thing. We have history books to tell us those feelings are real and that those things happened.

What we forgot when we exulted that now anything was possible was that everything could now be taken away. That those who had nothing to live for would be able to invent something to die for, and then they would want us to die for it, as well.

Each of us knows someone from our school, our work, our family, our town who has served in uniform in the last two decades, probably more often than one tour of duty, and as long as we don't think about any of that too hard or too long, it nearly makes sense. Only when there are moments that you stand stock-still and silent, when someone you know is hurt or worse, do the doubts creep in and you wonder if what you see is really what you get.

How far can we go on faith alone? At least twenty-four years because there's the marker up ahead. Perhaps you should choose to not only remember and make a difference, but be the difference.  
Memor vir, vos es pulvis quod tergum ut pulvis vos vadum reverto.

-bill kenny

Sleepless in Norwich

Watching our two children grow up, I always admired the ease with which they fell asleep. I think they have that from their mother, as I am someone who wrestles every night with every interaction I had the previous day, rehashing them in an effort to resolve them. 

But I'm NOT consistent. Some nights, I just drop right off, and if I dream, I remember none of it. Other nights, I toss and turn, trying to find that just-right position that calms the racing motor in my brain. 

I stumbled across this over the weekend and am keen to see if it works. You should check it out as well and get back to me.
-bill kenny

As They Say in Los Alamos

Some days you eat the bear.

And some days the bear eats you.
-bill kenny

A Little Dusty but.....

When you've written as much in this space as I have, for as long as I have,every once in a while, you rediscover a nugget from the past that still makes sense to you. In light of present political circumstances, this one surprised even me. 
At the time, I called it: 

How Do You Figure the Tip on the Bill of Rights?

When the Founding Fathers, assisted by others, created the Bill of Rights (and this is a marvelous site), they could not have foreseen the world in which we now live. 

For them, freedom of speech, and within that, 'the press', was a matter of newspapers and broadsides (one-sheet exhortations and excoriations on behalf of and in opposition to issues of Colonial America). 

That a growing number of people would choose to get their news from TikTok rather than what an aging boomer like me calls 'trad media,' is more than disquieting. 

We choose 'rock, paper, scissors' on where to turn and tune in for news and information. Truisms are often truths, and perceptions of reality are frequently reality. What we call news, no matter the presentation format, now does more persuasion and less informing today than ever before because advocacy draws better ratings than reporting. 

I can no longer define 'journalist,' hell, most of the time I can't even recognize one while wandering around things like YouTube. But I am chagrined to discover I can't swing a cat and NOT hit self-styled one on whatever platform I choose. Anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection is a journalist (present typist included), it seems. And then we wonder why there's so much 'fake news.'.  

Most pander to audience 'segments' as long as those segments buy the products those platforms and messages are supported by, from the advertisers who bought them because the demographics deliver certain groups in large numbers.....and round goes the gossip. A self-licking ice cream cone.

You must get as tired reading it as I get tired typing it: the issues we face can't be captured in a seventy-second story with a ten-second stand-up location lock-out. They require our fullest attention, no matter our political beliefs (as a matter of fact, precisely because of our political beliefs). 

Not just Democrats or liberals require health care, and not just Republicans or conservatives are taxed too much. And people who feel that way or who feel differently don't come from another dimension or drink their bath water (or any of the other insults we manufacture when we disagree with each other). The farther out in space you travel, the more we all look alike down here. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
-bill kenny

More in the Mirror

If our lives are like candles, I'm pretty close to being little more than a wick. Great thing about hindsight, it's always 20./20 whether you choose to see what it is revealing or not. 

I was born before we elected Eisenhower as President. These days, he wouldn't get the time of day from the party he led at the time. Sic tramsit gloria, I guess. Struggled to put on a new T-shirt this morning with a tag that told me it was "Made in Vietnam," and going back more than half a century, I'm surprised I survived the world I grew up in.

I came of age with the War in Vietnam, not that I was anywhere near at risk. Fifty-eight thousand (plus) US military casualties and hundreds of thousands of damaged and destroyed lives later, we in the Land of the Round Doorknobs had our precious Peace with Honor. And those of us who were Baby Boomers, both the old enough to serve in the killing fields and those young enough to only watch it on TV, returned to our lives, already in progress.

We, the privileged who remained safe as houses on these shores, blamed our parents' generation and more ominously, those who bore arms in that conflict, for "the war" (the definite article, even then, made me wince). I was shocked--ashamed more than shocked--to eavesdrop on a conversation among service men and women the age of our two adult children recently on Facebook in which they, who have done an inordinate amount of the fighting and dying for almost the last decade in places the rest of us cannot find, turned their gaze on MY generation.

Not very pretty, but I fear, pretty accurate. My cohorts and I were described as the 'most self-centered people to ever walk the planet' with an indictment citing 'their exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement is beyond offensive and is why the world they are leaving for us is such a ...(large numbers of Bozo No-No words in combinations I'm not used to reading). I couldn't argue a single point any of the five or six posters made, and after I'd offer, 'but our intentions were good!' I'd have had nothing to say.

We gave the world sex without love or commitment-elevating it to a recreational (if not circus-like) activity that can and often does, when performed unprotected, kill people of every race, creed, and color. We traded blue skies and air you can breathe for BMWs, sub-standard schools, and sub-prime mortgages, then closed our eyes (and held our noses) as we started our descent into the abyss of political and moral bankruptcy. 

We reinvented the financial universe so that no one and everyone has money, and is also bankrupt, all at the same time. Not only did we make sure the toothpaste cannot ever be put back in the tubes, but we also flushed most of what we inherited from our parents down those very same tubes.

The children of the Boomers have already started to clean up after their elders, as gargantuan an undertaking as that will prove to be. A chapter of a book on a faraway shelf has come to a close, but the story goes on, because, as a nation, so, too, must we. 
-bill kenny

Another Life Lesson

If you have children in school, the end of summer is old news. You long ago knew it was gone as you readied them for this first full week. 

Even if your children are grown and gone, you're still aware of school as the buses wend their way throughout town, while elsewhere groups of youngsters of all ages trip and troop across sidewalks and crosswalks, all in the name of learning.

In the days ahead, many of us will be back to managing families the way a horse runs: one footfall at a time, rarely, if ever, looking far enough ahead to see if our path is taking us to where we want to go or, instead, leading us over the proverbial cliff.

Perhaps different where you live, but here in Norwich, now and when city budget discussions heat up next April, are really the only times we devote any thought to education, which is unfair to children, teachers, parents, actually, to all of us. This is not an advocacy for more money for schools-there isn't any more money, but, and it's a cliche, if you think education is expensive, try calculating the cost of ignorance.

You and I went to different high schools together-and, trust me on this one-different elementary schools, too. Our schools were so different from the ones our children attend, they could just as easily be from another planet. 

Actually, without putting too fine a point on it, it was a very different world, and when you look at us now, the society and culture we inherited from our parents and then look at what we are giving to their grandchildren, the 'stuff in the middle' is our doing.

A glance at a newspaper, a TV screen, a handheld device, or a computer monitor is all you need to confirm our world is a dangerous and different place now. Gone or going is the industrial age, being replaced often rudely and without ceremony by the knowledge age. 

I typed this on a workstation keyboard. Our children live in a world of hand-held digital devices that make our desktops and laptops look like Gutenberg's press. Access to information, the how-to, and the what-you-do-with-it-next are the world our children and theirs will live in, and lamentations about how that's not what school was like when we were young help no one at all.

Stasis in life and in learning is foolish and fatal. Everyone with an interest in education, and that means all of us, must recognize that the purpose of education should be to learn the rules of life better than anyone else so that you can change the rules. Always a good thing to remember, especially as the seasons change yet again.
-bill kenny

Leaf Me Alone

Another summer has come and gone. For those who've lived through the winter of our discontent, I'm hoping we have an Indian Summer and then a lovely fall that mysteriously and miraculously blends effortlessly into a beautiful New England spring. 

What's that you say? Winter. Sorry, I can't hear you, and there's no point in speaking up or repeating yourself; I still can't hear you. I understand the restorative powers and the role each of the seasons plays. I don't choose to enjoy winter. Ever since I didn't get that new sled for St. Nikolaustag a couple of decades ago, I'm over it.

Considering the speed with which this summer passed and the number of us who had fervent hopes but few plans for what we were to do with it, perhaps what I should learn is to enjoy the days while they are here.

Anticipation is great (and perfect on burgers), but savoring the flavor of the moment, while in the moment, may be something us old people who think we're not should cultivate and not try so hard to avoid.
-bill kenny

My September Song

Here we are ending the Labor Day Weekend. What's that feeling? The neuralgia of nostalgia? You decide. 

Leave it to the unofficial closing of another summer to make me nostalgic, bordering on maudlin. Technically, I'm enjoying my 73rd Labor Day, though in truth, I have no memory of the earliest ones, and I've yet to get a clear sense, despite a reasonable amount of reading, on how old we are before we have memories.

Is that true for you as well? I'll suddenly flash on something from my childhood and not be altogether sure if it's real, or a remembered clip from a movie--my Mom's youngest brother, Paul, when we visited her parents in Elechester out in Flushing, Long Island, (before the World's Fair and Shea Stadium), always calling me 'droopy drawers' and pulling down my trousers and laughing. I recall being a small child, helpless to prevent it and enraged at my own impotence (though I didn't realise that's what I felt at the time). 

Growing up, I always heard relatives say I looked like Paul, which made me tighten my jaw and hold on to my pants. I think they said that because we both had freckles and lots of them. I know my coloring made me burn up in the sun, as after twenty minutes without sunscreen, I looked like a lobster. And when the burn finally faded, I wasn't tanning, but peeling. 

At times later in our lives, my sister Kara reminded me of Paul, especially when she laughed, which is a little odd because by the time she was born, Paul and his family were living out on the west coast and rarely came east. 

I flash forward to that same uncle in the back seat of my car, with my father's step-brother (an actual priest) in the shotgun seat, as we rode to the cemetery in East Millstone, NJ, to bury my father. I think that may have been the last time Paul came east, as some years later he was diagnosed with I-no-longer-remember-what from which he died. 

I was in Germany, in the era before cheap long-distance phone calls and the Internet, so letters and cards were the bridge from home, and I learned we only read you when you write, and no one likes to write bad news when it's still news, so I learned of his death months, if not longer, after it had happened. 

When I was a kid, we hadn't yet gone back to school; that happened after Labor Day, and when the New Year began, I'd always look ahead on the calendar to see when the first Monday in September was, always hoping for a date that looked like the 5th or 6th, as if wishing would make it so. Thank goodness we now structure school calendars by union agreements and not on any educational goals, requirements, or needs.

I've never attended my high school or college reunion--one of the places I worked for some years used to hold worldwide reunions every two years, in different locations around the globe, and I never worked up the interest or the passion, or, in all honesty, the courage, to attend any of them. 

I have a growing-more-dim-by-the-day memory of being one of 400,000 at Watkins Glen in upstate New York for the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and The Band, but all three of these bands are long gone, members dead. The souvenir tee shirt "Ball 'n' Boogie" went from the dresser to the rag bin to the garbage decades ago. 

My generational cohort grew up in the swamps of Vietnam and in the aftermath of the murders of JFK, MLK, and RFK. We survived Timothy Leary better than he himself did, had parents who didn't understand us (until we became them as it turned out), and stayed up late to watch a man walk on the moon. 

We were what sociologists call the Pig in the Python generation, and yet, I suspect when the last of us has passed (and we will, which, when we were kids, was inconceivable), we'll have left a hole akin to the one in a bucket of water when you pull your fist out. 

It'll be our children's children who'll wrestle with the consequences of our decisions on the environment, on energy, on public financing, and world-wide diplomatic outreaches and these days, as hard as we think they are right now, will, with the gift of hindsight, be viewed as the Golden Ones as they "hang round 'neath the vapor light." 
-bill kenny