Wonders and Worries

As I mentioned last week, we've arrived at that season where the only space on your front lawn NOT covered by autumn leaves probably has a sign urging others to vote for a specific candidate for City Council, Mayor, or member of the Board of Education.

And while we’re all waiting for some form of debates between and among the candidates for Mayor as well as among those running for City Council, let me advocate and agitate for letting those who are Board of Education candidates be heard. Frankly, when was the last time we heard a debate among those folks?

I endorse the notion that there's no such thing as a Republican or a Democratic Party method to educate third graders, but in recent years the City Council has made decisions on policemen versus firemen versus building inspectors versus infrastructure repairs versus long-delayed pension contributions, etc., because of reduced tax revenues and an ongoing rise in municipal expenses in which the operating budget for the Board of Education is well north of 50% of the entire City’s.

We fixate on this twice every year: during budget deliberations and when we receive our tax bills.  The rest of the time we seem to think paying for municipal goods and services is someone else’s problem when we are, in fact, the someone else with that problem.

I'd like to hear what those whom we choose as members of the Board of Education think our priorities should be, and learn a bit more about what, if any, ideas for economies and/or enhancements (and how to pay for them) they wish to share.

Be warned: I’m looking for a candidate who pledges to organize children for weekend redeemable-can-and-bottle drives to pay for field trips and administrator salary increases. Obviously, I was trying to be humorous, though you may have only gotten the trying part.

Meanwhile, with a little more than a month until Election Day, there's NOT a debate by anyone, anywhere on the horizon in Norwich when there should be at least one once a week, anywhere, because we have the blessings of (informed) choice and need to know as much as we can about those who have offered their time and talents in our service.

In recent days I’ve had people tell me to support various people because ‘they love Norwich, and they mean well.’ I had already assumed the former; as for the latter, I’m tired of people who mean well and would like some who are willing to do well, for all of us. Just as a change of pace.  

Here's my point (thanks for reading this far hoping I might have one): Lawn signs/letters to newspaper editors supporting candidates are well and good but we need to pay closer attention to all those ‘for sale’ signs which signal that more and more of us have decided there are no more happy endings, or beginnings, left around here.

Each one of those signs is a surrender that does just a little more damage to the fabric of our neighborhoods, and I wonder and worry that we may never know from any of this year’s crop of candidates how they intend to stop the rush to the exits even as the moving vans circle the block.
-bill kenny

A (not THE) Christmas Story

Merry Christmas. I hope, if possible, you have the opportunity to be surrounded and in the embrace of the love of family and friends. And that this is not just for today, but for all days. Perhaps if we all concentrated on living the message of the Christmas Story on a daily basis, the annual observation of the event would come easier for us.

Four days ago, thanks to the global village and world wide connectivity (brought to me by the same military-industrial complex we normally blame for all the evils of the world (real and and/or imagined), to include the music of Celine Dion and Buckner booting that easy grounder), I had a facebook email (Or do they have their own name for that, perhaps facemail?) friend request from someone whose name I did not recognize but who listed my wife as a friend.

This one was easy since I see Sigrid, my wife, on a daily basis (the apartment isn't all that big and I know many of her usual hiding places) and she shared with me the friend request was from her former best friend and matron of honor at our wedding, damals, Evelyn F, now with a new last name as she and Rick F had gone their separate ways and each had remarried. She is now living back in Germany, only a couple of hours south of where she had grown up and was just starting out on her World Wide Wander.

Two days later, I had email from a person from Port Arthur, Texas, who had stumbled upon this gibberish the night before via a search engine into which she had entered the names of her Godparents from many years ago-their names had turned up in an entry I had written about the day Sigrid and I had married. Michelle G, the woman from Port Arthur, wrote she had been looking for this couple for over a decade and wondered if the people I had mentioned might, indeed, be the object of her search.

To tell you the truth, I had and have no idea if our Evelyn and Rick are hers, too. I know, especially today, how I'd like the story to turn out. Because of a variety of threads, all woven invisibly together, seemingly at random, I was in a position to relay her note, via my wife, to Evelyn and maybe brighten more than just one person's Christmas. Sort of like the First Christmas, except for the animals, the shepherds in the fields, The Star with Royal Beauty Bright, Pentium II computer chips, dial-up modems and, most importantly, the manger, The Mother and Child. Merry Christmas.
-bill kenny

Quoting from the Book of Vonnegut....

As we near the first Tuesday in November and hopefully think more and more about the large issues that afflict and affect us nationally (pause while you silently list your Top Five; hey! Stop moving your lips!) I want to dwell not so much on worrying from the top down, but working from the bottom up.

I don't know what I don't know, which is a curse and a blessing in many ways. When I was a kid, I didn't know about gravity, but I watched George Reeves as Superman and thought the trick to flying was a cape. I still have one-but now it comes with a sense of caution and lowered expectations. At least there are fewer emergency room visits, proving experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted.

But it seems more and more to me, those who get what they want are the people who've decided that rules are for people who don't know better. Manners and mores are private rules and ethics are public ones, and too many seem to have neither. The schemers always beat the dreamers. They have an agenda and NO conscience and we have only a hazy notion of the former and far too much of the latter.

The grubbers and grabbers think The Good Lord gave them two hands so they could take as much as they want and two pockets to put it all in. We struggle to teach our children what is right and fair. They hire lawyers and execute secret covenants. They buy those they can't bully and bully those they cannot buy. Instead of arguing over a principle, be it large issues like universal access to affordable health care or local issues such as land use and smart growth, they trap us into arguments about specific topics and use 'love me, love my dog' arguments that leave everyone poorer for the exchange, while nothing is revealed.
Many of us have the best local government money can buy-our officials become accidental chattel and the only real question is how much will this cost? For too long, for a variety of reasons, too many of us have assumed those whom we have placed in charge know best. And for even longer, those in charge have believed they not only know EVERYTHING, they know everything BETTER.

Across the country, from town to town and city to city, we have pursued zero-sum politics and, practically without exception it has created streets in need of paving, not only sweeping, sewers that cannot rid us of our own waste fast and safely enough, a police department more and more regard with jaundiced mistrust even as those who serve battle low morale and dispirited zero leadership, more firemen than Ray Bradbury ever dreamed you could have in Fahrenheit 451, and school systems where the instructional staff generates point papers and PowerPoint slides to explain that their failures in the classroom with our children are the result of invisible and far away others that only expending more money can possible fix.

You've read it here before, we are all we will ever have to rebuild and reinvent where we live. And that's as it should be, as we are all we shall ever need. For purely perverse reasons, we now believe if we do nothing we can do nothing wrong and forget that every Brave Dream begins with a leap of faith. We chose to live where we choose to be, and while that varies from one to the other, it's what has brought us all to the places and spaces we are in. So many people in the same device.

All that we carry is all that we are-and it includes our hopes for a better life for our children and ourselves. We cannot continue to allow those whom we have selected to elect to be so cavalier and unmindful of our dreams. There's an old Spiritual that sings about "I am but one-but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something." We are not too late and we are not too few. Now is the time and we are the people.
-bill kenny