(Lights and Shadows and light again) A Day of Infamy followed by an infamous day

Today in Norwich, CT, thanks to a lot of hard work in especially hard times by very generous people from across our community, we'll have our Annual Winterfest Parade. It looks like the weather will cooperate though that rarely changes anything--one year we had temperatures, I'm NOT making this up, in the middle sixties (my idea of winter-and my apologies to all the kids that year who got sleds) and the next year we had a raging blizzard (from which I developed pneumonia and when the doctor made a house call he came on dog sled. Oh, the irony!).

Today, when the marchers. floats, fire trucks and bands step off from Chelsea Parade (how perfect is that name?) at one o'clock, the weather should be somewhere in the middle which is where most of us are as well, I suspect. Even if we're not graduates of the London School of Economics, we know something has gone wrong and we're disquieted that whatever is broken is not getting repaired. Like you, I'm 'in the market' through my employer in some type of mutual funds (I think. Hey! I went to the Linden (NJ) School of Economics, so cut me some slack ) so I figured out Friday night if I retired on the first of January my wife and I could live on my savings and stock portfolio for the rest of our lives. Assuming we weren't planning on living past 1030 AM, January 2nd.

But today isn't just the Winter Parade in Norwich (and please come if you're in the area, it's a great deal of fun and that's in short supply these days), it's also the 67th anniversary of the attack at Pearl Harbor in whose aftermath the USA redefined itself as a nation and within the world of nations until the attacks of 911 to which the former is invariably compared. America of 1941, and the world for that matter, was very different from our world today and it's with that span of time, I suspect, comes some detachment in looking at the attack half a world away for those on the Eastern Seaboard.

I learned something about Pearl Harbor as a child in American History classes, and then later at college through my classes and studies and still later when I encountered men (and women) who had served in World War II, and not always on the victorious side. The more I learned, the less I knew which is one of the positive results of education: when you don't know what you don't know, you're at your most dangerous. When the last resort, armed force, becomes the first recourse, we all lose. I've never had the chance, yet, to visit the USS Arizona Memorial in Hawaii (it wasn't the only ship sank and her Sailors weren't the only ones who died), but I'd hope to do so someday.

I wandered across the battlefields of World War II while living in Europe from Normandy, France (where every single bar is called June 6, or at least it seems that way), past the ruins in downtown Frankfurt am Main, (West) Germany, as modern a city as you could otherwise ever imagine. I visited Dachau, just outside of Munich, walking through the remainders and reminders of the barracks trying to grasp that people had lived (and died) there. I never got used to the fact that no birds were ever heard at Bergen-Belsen in the Luneberg Heide, one of the Nazi interim equations as they made their Final Solution. As if God, Himself, had turned His face from us, ashamed of His people, whom (we believe) are created in His likeness.

All of those spaces and places are connected as if in a straight line to Pearl Harbor, Bataan, the Rape of Nanking, and a thousand other geographic locales (more than 20 million men (and women) fought in World War II and the death toll of those who were non-combatants may be higher than that number) as a perverse demonstration that as noble as we can be, the depths of our depravity and indifference towards one another may not yet be plumbed.

Monday, for those who came of age with The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show, will mark the 27th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon by Mark Chapman. That my two children both were born after his murder still gives me pause. He had been part of the soundtrack of my growing up years from teenie through adult and while a lot of his post-Beatles material hadn't spoken to me in the same way as his earlier solo work or any of the Fab Four material, but his recent release at the time, Double Fantasy, was, as I called it when playing it at the radio station I worked for, 'a decent EP' (Extended Play) though I always felt "Beautiful Boy" was breathtakingly exquisite. I assumed without thinking Lennon would always be a part of my life (and of my children as well).

So much for the patience he sang of in that song. His son, Sean, was to grow up without his father (as did all of us, though to a different degree) and has worked to live within and without the shadow of the legend his father became. Not the best two days any of us will ever have, today and tomorrow ("Nobody told me there'd be days like these"), but in looking at the darkness that both have in such abundance, it can make our appreciation of the light and this, The Season of Light and Hope, that much more pronounced for all the days that remain.
-bill kenny

Get Over It

Have you given any thought to preparing an invoice for the rest of us? I ask because of the drumbeat of stories I've read in the newspapers and catch on the TV about people, just like us (well, not really, they have press agents, a very low threshold of self-esteem and NO shame), who are the victims of a giant conspiracy of an uncaring universe that has so scarred them for life (psychic scars on your soul never heal for settlements of less than seven figures) they will never recover. Sadly, for the rest of us, they will also never go away.

The folks who find odd items in fast food menu purchases, Ka-Ching! The grade school child who was tagged too hard and whose father wants dollars instead of the healing touch, Ka-Ching! I've been mulling over the knee surgery I had three years ago--thought it was an excellent job, but you know what? I still haven't been on Dancing With the Stars, and I think maybe somebody, some place, owes me some green. What say you?

With all these bailouts going on, how about us kids in the weeds? Corporate relo refugees that need love, too. Yeah, that's what we should be talking about. We need a lot LESS 'E Pluribus Unum' and lot MORE 'What's In It For Me?' We have moms creating fake screen identities to payback, in extremis, teenage girls whom they suspect said mean things about their teenage daughters and it results in a child taking her own life.

A generation ago, this would have never been possible. Our parents had their own lives, and we, ours. If we were lucky, maybe our Moms knew the names of some of the kids who hung out with us (our dads never did-they always called 'Neil', 'Bob' and when you told them later they always went 'oh?'). Now the parents are part of the posse, and maybe part of the problem. Don't worry, we have someone on the staff to take care of that for you, for a small consideration, of course.

Nothing is anyone's fault. I LOVE when some elected/anointed and appointed personality is forced to admit wrongdoing and 'confesses'. Actually, they confirm what's already known, which isn't confession. Monsignor Harding explained exactly what confession was and what it meant to me over fifty years ago. I suppose today I should issue a press release and seek representation.

After the public confession (not yet, wait until the CNN crew gets here), there's always a statement to the effect that "I take full responsibility"--what does that actually mean? Anything we want, as it turns out. Complain about the present and blame it on the past. I'd like to find your inner child and kick its little a--.
-bill kenny

I Read the news today, oh boy

I received a call Wednesday from a colleague who shared some not unexpected, but still very sad, news. Carl Bryson, the last surviving sailor of USS SQUALUS died. Calling hours are today from 4 to 7 PM at the Byles Memorial Home in New London. I'm not advocating a mad rush to get there, so much as suggesting, perhaps, spending a moment to reflect on his life and times.

I am not, nor ever was, a sailor--submarine or otherwise but I appreciate those who are and the service they render on behalf of the rest of us. I've toured Historic Ship Nautilus in Groton, Connecticut, and have read enough history to appreciate the leap forward nuclear power was for submarines. But I am still uneasy at just walking through the cramped space, fifty years on still cramped, that's work and home for extended periods of time. And did I mention underwater? I've listened as sub sailors explain the importance of maintaining an exact one-to-one correlation of submergences to surfacings--their way of making light of the very real danger of what lies beneath.

Back in the day--actually, nearly seventy years ago, the USS SQUALUS failed to accomplish the ratio properly. She partially flooded and sank, coming to rest two hundred and forty feet deep. Carl Bryson was a member of that crew-and, as I understood the stories, was in the last group of crewmen to be rescued. I asked him, when, through pure luck, I met him (still spry in his Eighties), what he'd said to the rescue party as they prepared to evacuate the last of the crew BEFORE his group. He softly smiled, "I said, 'take your time and good luck-I'm not going anywhere.'"

We all remember, or should, the tragedy of KURSK but, in looking back at the evolution of all aspects of every submarine navy, and scrolling through some of the on-line materials on SQUALUS, it's impossible to not be impressed with the courage it took just to report aboard a submarine (actually, that's as true now as it was then). Ordinary men doing extraordinary things on a daily and routine basis.

Thirty-three sailors survived the sinking of SQUALUS. Herculean, heroic actions in the most trying of circumstances with no more than rudimentary (and in some instances, untried) rescue devices, were taken to rescue them by many who spent decades strenuously denying any and all assertions that they had been heroes at all. They were just doing their jobs and helping their shipmates.

It takes all kinds to make a world. I believe we are, each in our own way, the sum of everyone we've ever met. I consider myself very lucky to have shared the planet with Carl Bryson. I was impressed beyond words (rarely happens with me as we both know) by his humility and humanity. To have seen what he saw, done what he did and survived in the face of some very long odds brought home how fortunate I have always been and how blessed we are as a nation to have had the quiet heroes we have always had.

"There is a port of no return, where ships/
May ride at anchor for a little space.
And then, some starless night, the cable slips,
Leaving an eddy at the mooring place . . .
Gulls, veer no longer. Sailor, rest your oar.
No tangled wreckage will be washed ashore."
-bill kenny

Oil is limited. Knowledge is infinite

I spend a lot of time roaming the TV dial, sampling TV shows in six second increments. As a vidiot, I'm a hunter and NOT a gatherer. We have a cable provider who has designated a channel (I don't know which one) as a sort of TV guide station and we also have those complex remotes (with everything except a Swiss army knife) so that I can push buttons and read program summaries with little effort. Except the summaries never tell me that the character, let's say "Bob", on CSI: Secaucus, used to be "Joe" on Law and Side Order, that show about the kid working his way through law school at Mickey D's.

This stuff is important, at least to me. I've recently started to watch NCIS (yeah, I know it's been on awhile-I like to let the writers and the actors work out the bugs on the shows, first before I get involved) and realized, eventually, one of the folks in that show used to be a character in a wheelchair on a TV show set in the future whose actual point and plot were obscure to me but that starred Jessica Alba (hence, my disinterest in the plot) when she had dark hair, on another network. The drop down window on the TV remote said NOTHING about any of this. As for the episode of NCIS? No clue. Jessica Alba wasn't in it. And neither was Jessica Biel (I think).

Because either my thumb was sore or because the batteries in the remote were spent, I ended up the other day on CSPAN (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network) which, along with CSPAN2 (now that's a catchy name, doncha think?) and ALL the home shopping stations I tend to hop over without getting any on me (how does anyone buy jewelry from a TV?). Because the person on CSPAN was Eric Schmitt and without hitting the cable remote, which wouldn't have helped, I knew he was the Chairman of Google (the most successful noun and verb word in any language in the history of language) I stuck around. Today's title is inspired by his remarks and underscores his point (I think) that the pen, and the ideas it captures, is more powerful than the sword and the drilling rig.

He was speaking as a member of the New America Foundation on Transition and Government but one of the things he was talking about stopped me in my surfing, the Google 2030 Energy Plan. Do you remember the gas prices of this past summer? Okay, let's start slower: do you remember last summer? Good. And going to the beach, or the the lake or to grandma's house and the cost of gas and an arm and a leg and a firstborn? Ahh, yes, it all comes back now, doesn't it? It looked like the Hummer was an endangered species (the vehicle, perv) and we wondered when regular would hit five bucks a gallon (here in CT-it went past that on The Other Coast) and T. Boone Pickens seemed like a Wildcatter Jeremiah, didn't he?

Now, at under two bucks a gallon for gasoline, we cannot believe our own good fortune. If we only had jobs to drive to, the commute would be far less expensive than six months ago. And if the credit crunch continues, we'll soon be living out of our cars, and they'll be cheaper to keep running at night, especially on those cold winter nights in the Northeast. Talk about taking lemons and making lemonade, eh?

But back on the TV, as Schmidt spoke, I started to nose around on the New America Foundation site--very heady stuff. Don't have the time or money to take a weekend vacation? Go to the Big Ideas for a New America section and pick a topic. If you don't see another perspective or another point of view and approach to what you've been reading and hearing for months and years within the first five paragraphs of anything you click on, I'll eat a bug (insert bug joke here). Every time I need to get charged up again about this proposition we call the United States and need to believe, again, that we are, together, smarter than each of us separately, this is where I head.

I'd have never found any of it without CSPAN. All this time, I thought CSPAN was just about Brian Lamb. How can I make amends? How about this for an idea to goose the ratings for Booknotes, Brian? It involves the two Jessica's, some Barry White albums and the Kama Sutra (there's those Google guys and gals again!), either paperback or hard cover.
-bill kenny

Sometimes Free Lunch Isn't Free, and Isn't Even Lunch

Last week, one of the principals involved in the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission actions spoke to local elected and community leaders about the danger of laurels (with and without hardys) and/or resting on them. Anthony Principi was instrumental, suggested regional media in the summer of 2005, in removing both the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire and also in Kittery, Maine (look at the map if you don't believe me) and the Naval Submarine Base New London, that's actually in Groton (you don't need a map just a sense of whimsy), Connecticut from the Department of Defense's kill zone of installations to be closed.

Southeastern CT which used to be heavily reliant on defense jobs (Electric Boat, one of two builders of nuclear powered submarines is located here) with the Submarine Base and in recent years, has also come to rely on the two casinos. For part of the summer of 2005, the region was quiet, desperate, afraid and then relieved as the final BRAC report kept the submarine base open and the sun shone. Mr. Principi's remarks less than fortnight ago were to remind everyone that the world is in a state of flux (always remember to use the 'x') and what once was, may no longer be, at least the next time around. (Try telling that to Red Sox fans who've won three world championships in baseball in the last eighty four years and think their team is on a hot streak. Okay, so all three have come in the last five years...as a Yankees fan, I don't see their point. Kidding.)

I'm old enough to remember 'in case of nuclear attack' drills in grammar school in the 1950's (there was nothing quaint about them, in case you wondered), the Cuban Missile Crisis and better dead than red to, and through, 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall' and damn, if he didn't! And as scary as this brave new world is, with asynchronous warfare and horrors without end, it doesn't hold a candle to what was hanging over our heads for over four decades starting with the end of World War II.

A lot has changed but sometimes we forget and we find ourselves doing what we've always done because we've always done it Every one agrees that in a dangerous world, the US needs a strong military to serve as a deterrent and bulwark-and many advocate for a more mixed and agile force that we can dial up or dial back based on the nature of the adversary we are opposing. To a man with a hammer, the whole world is a nail. But who pays for the hammers and how?

That's the scary thing in SE Connecticut (and anywhere that has an industrial base tied to the production of goods or services for the military), there's a tendency, too often (and not incorrectly), to see submarine construction and basing as a jobs issue and NOT as a national defense topic which is what the Base Realignment and Closure process was supposed to be about (I say 'supposed to' because, try as they might, there would and will always be some politics in these decisions-at least as long as human beings have to make them). When your house payment is dependent on your salary from building or maintaining submarines, or as a Sailor fighting his ship from a pier based in Connecticut (disappearing for months at a time on missions you cannot even tell your family about), it's more than just an academic exercise when we speak about repurposing ALL of our military, active duty and reserve, as well as national guard to provide the best possible service in defense of the country at the most reasonable cost.

We cannot buy national defense the way we buy hamburger, or the Sunday pot roast. And while it's great to pray for peace and work for it, too (I think that's probably a bit more effective, but that's because I know who pays the price when politics precludes peace, the Salt of the Earth), we need to better define what we need and how we intend to use it and pay for it and then analyze how it's working out, making adjustments as we go along. My children smile when I talk about the 4-H shows I attended in Central Jersey in the early Sixties with bomb shelter kits. I don't want us to continue to bankrupt ourselves, financially, morally or militarily because we may run out of history before we can repair the damage.
-bill kenny

Ships in the Night

Sometimes, even when you know something is coming, when it arrives you're surprised (and chagrined that you lost sight of it). Such is the case today. Yesterday was my father's eighty-fifth birthday. I'm not alone in missing it. He, himself, never lived to see it, having died twenty-seven years ago this past Memorial Day.

My father was the smartest man in the world and when I was very young, I worked incredibly hard to not disappoint him and failed every time. As I got older and watched each of my sisters and brothers endure the same cycle of affectionate expectation and angry disappointment, I wondered why it was we grew up, because as we did, he had less and less in common with us. He was passionate, with an acerbic tongue driven by his hopes for each of us that, so often, seemed to be beyond our abilities to ever fulfill.

I can recall vividly the day, in a fit of anger over a niggling project that was not coming out right, my father telling me 'it was never my idea to name you after me.' I can still see myself standing as if rooted to the spot and realizing he had a smirk on his face because he knew he had wounded me and that nothing I could say would ever counter that, and so, from that moment on, I said as little as possible for as long as possible.

My father was the quintessential 'wait until your father gets home' parent, with a son who sought out trouble, such as mocking the nun who taught seventh grade (I cannot imagine how I came by this behavior, honestly) to the point where the principal, Sister Immaculata suspended me. Believe me, I was one child who could wait for his father to come home.

As I grew older the distance between us grew larger until we rarely attempted to bridge the chasm at all. I grew up thinking we didn't get along because we were so different only to realize many years later, it was because we were so much alike, perhaps too much alike.

My father got up in the middle of the night to drive to the railroad station in New Brunswick, N.J. and took the train into "New York" (actually Manhattan but I think everyone who does not live in NYC always thinks of Manhattan even as they say New York), where he taught the sons of power brokers like the thin rail of a young man who grew up to be the publisher of the New York Times, yes, Arthur, I mean you, as I also mean TD, who was the son of the former owner of one of the two New York professional football teams.

It was how my father defined himself in the world. We'd ride the bus up to 62nd street, beyond Boyd's Chemist, past the GM building and he'd tell me "I tutored Douglas T---" whose father had designed it. As I was to discover decades later, the parents of these children thought of him not at all, he was part of their scenery.

He was so smart--he had to know that. And yet, he still made the journey, traveling in the dark in both directions, six days a week so that we would want for nothing, as long as what we didn't want was him. He gave his time to total strangers. I heard amazing stories from those whom he taught at the reception in my mother's house after his funeral. I thought those stories had confused him with someone else, since the person they described wasn't the man under whose roof I had lived.

In the years since his death I've become a father myself. I'm not suggesting cause and effect, but I had never wanted children when my wife and I wed but, when we learned she was pregnant with Patrick Michael, I was ecstatic. Since then, I've often wondered how he and I, fathers both now, might speak to one another as opposed to all the years when we spoke at one another. Then I remember you cannot miss what you did not have. I, long ago, stopped asking for forgiveness even before my father was no longer able to grant it. And now, when I look in the mirror, I can see the past more clearly than ever, but have no idea of how it got there or how to repair it.
-bill kenny

Meetings in My Little Town

As we edge closer to the holidays, more and more aspects of our lives more stridently compete for our attention. Add to that the uncertainties many of us have right now in terms of employment, and the enjoyment level seems to plummet.

Meetings this week in Norwich aren't a competing item-but a complementary aspect of living here. Between scouring the city's website and tracking items in the local newspapers, you can have a good idea of the shape of things to come without a lot of effort. I mention that, because on more than one occasion I've encountered fellow residents who are not cognizant of a decision or a meeting about a decision in which they have an interest and the default position seems to be blame 'them'. The problem, to my way of thinking, is that we are them, in much the same way as I am he and you are he and you are me and we are all together.

If knowledge is power, here's some bonus chin ups and sit ups in terms of what's going on this week in the Rose City (the difference between being exorcised and exercised is what you do with the information, I suppose):

The agenda for tonight's City Council meeting is here. It starts at 7:30 PM. The first Council meeting of the month must start at 7:30 and must be in City Council chambers, by charter. I mention that as this Council, when it convened a year ago, had expressed a desire to have a meeting each quarter beyond the walls of City Hall. After a couple of months, and some pretty lively outreach opportunities, that idea sort of went away (they weren't actual Council meetings just a chance for different neighborhoods to check under the hood).

You can decide for yourself what is of interest and importance on the agenda (trick observation: everything is important to someone) and if you feel strongly about any of the issues, for or against, you'll have the opportunity during one of the two public comment periods to share your thoughts with the alderpersons.

But...before the City Council meeting, starting at six, is a public hearing down the hall in room 335 by the CT Office of Policy and Management on the proposed change of land designation on Scotland and Hanson Roads. You remember this one, right? The hearing in Hartford in July where no one from the City was present and in the absence of any objections, a zoning change was granted to allow development of an 'active adult' community that provoked large numbers of adults already living in that area to become active? Yeah, and then there was a lot of shouting and pointing and mea culpaing (I'm not sure the Pope would appreciate my making that into a gerund, but it's Christmas, right?) and now the discussion will continue, or not. Pity the OPM website offers NO clues as to the agenda or even the existence of the meeting.

On Tuesday, for those who were discomfited last week by the absence of participation by anyone from the Board of Education at the Budget and Finance workshop, there's a meeting of the Board of Education Budget Expenditure Committee at 5 PM in the Central Office, which I understand is across from the Norwichtown Green. I should point out, I guess, that I don't have this meeting information from the Board's website which is inadequate and outdated in every sense of the word.

Also Tuesday, at 5:30, this time in Council Chambers at City Hall, is a meeting of the Sachem Fund Committee whose job is not getting easier as financial situations tighten within and without the City, as you can surmise by looking at their agenda which I suspect is all about refining and redefining what they do and how they do it.

At six PM, at 16 Golden Street, there's a special meeting of the Board of Public Utilities.

On Thursday night at seven in Council Chambers at City Hall is a meeting of the Inland Wetlands, Watercourses and Conservation Commission. I imagine the meeting agenda will be available to the public at the meeting. Here's a draft of their meeting minutes from the 19th of November, so you have some idea of what they've been working on.

Not a quiet week by any means, but as I said at the top, we have enough on our plates to suffice this time, until next time. "This old town's been home long as I remember/This town's gonna be here long after I'm gone/East side, West side--give up, or surrender--been down, But I still rock on."
-bill kenny