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