Leaf Me Alone

One of the downsides to living where there are four seasons is the transition from summer to autumn, especially for the trees and their leaves. I am very much of the 'live and let live' persuasion, which translates to the 'lie and let them lie' position on leaf gathering. 

I've noticed again this year in my neighborhood, some of us have gathered so many leaves, it's as if we're waiting for them to fall from the trees and nab them on the first bounce. We rake them up, and some of us, maybe you have the same kind of neighbors where you live (maybe you are that neighbor where you live), place them in black plastic bags awaiting pickup by the trash folks.

If it happens around here the way I watched it happen yesterday in Waterford, the dustmen empty the plastic bags into their trucks and discard the bags. This caused me to wonder what the point of the plastic bag was/is. 

Elsewhere, I've seen these VERY large paper bags filled with leaves-in theory, because the paper is biodegradable, all of it can go directly into the landfill--or do you think they're headed for incinerators? Around here, we have trash-to-power incineration units though I've no idea how much energy we get from such an operation.

For millions of years, I estimate, we as a species did nothing with the leaves as they fell. You see all that dirt all around us? I have a funny feeling where some of it might have come from, and I'm not sure what we're accomplishing by how we're operating now. 

While I wasn't looking, compost has become a lost cause, it seems, perhaps even a dark art. In its place, we have created a first-class annoyance, the leaf blower. We went from devices that looked like vacuums and picked up fallen leaves and plopped them into bags (do you remember those?) to a gadget that hangs from your hip and can be used to blow leaves that have fallen on your property into someone else's yard or out into the street.

I think leaf blowers are a much more accurate and contemporary symbol of America in the 21st Century than either the Bald Eagle or the Stars & Stripes. There is nothing that says "Wha?!" more than a guy on a Saturday afternoon working a leaf blower wearing dark shades with iBuds in both ears. 

And I'd ask him why he's doing what he's doing, but he's as oblivious to me right now as I am to him for the rest of the year. Ahh, Sweet Suburbia. We've got Mother Nature on the run--now what?
-bill kenny

An Inconvenient Truth

We lead very sheltered lives here in The Land of the Round Doorknobs. 

Most of us can't name five world leaders aside from our own President, and many of us have trouble naming our Congressional representatives, Senators, and in some instances Governor (met just such a moron yesterday). 

Many Americans don't know the difference between North and South Korea, and we currently have a Chief Executive Officer in the White House who apparently doesn't know the difference between South Africa and South America. 

I lived, loved, and worked in (West) Germany for fifteen years and remain very interested in all aspects of German life, sport, culture, and politics. In West Germany, the political parties were SPD, CDU, CSU, FDP, and the Greens. 

With the fall of the wall in November 1989 and the subsequent reunification of East and West Germany, additional political parties sprang up to include a rebranded Socialist Unity Party of Germany as the PDS and eventually as 'The Left.'

Germany, in my experience, is to Europe what the United States was to the world in terms of welcoming immigrants (that changed and not for the better when the USA elected a thirty-four-times convicted felon as President, but we can agree to disagree on that, I guess.). 

The USA has MAGAts, and the Germans have the Alternative for Germany, or Nazis (because that is what they are), and now, the white supremacists in charge of the USA would like to import a genuine German Nazi, fearing we don't have enough home-grown ones.  

Naomi Seibt is exactly what we don't need, now or ever, in the United States.
-bill kenny

Jail to the Thief

"Please allow me to introduce myself

I'm a man of wealth and taste   

I've been around for a long, long year

Stole many a man's soul and faith."

"Just as every cop is a criminal 

And all the sinners saints 

As heads is tails just call me Lucifer

'Cause I'm in need of some restraint."   

-bill kenny

What's the Word?

Your choice: 
maru mori (“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”); 

apolytus (“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”);

the wends (“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of  expectations”);

anoscetia (“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'”) or 

dès vu (“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”).

Or perhaps you'd choose Agnosthesia or Zielschmerz?
They're all there, waiting for an English Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
-bill kenny

Veterans Day 2025

Not everyone will make it to the Veterans Rally Point in the Norwich Business Park this morning at eleven minutes after eleven o'clock for the Veterans Day observances sponsored by the Peter Gallan American Legion Post #104 Taftville, CT, and the Norwich Area Veterans Council, but I'm sure there's a remembrance near where you live.

This is not Memorial Day-we honor everyone in uniform, living and dead, past and present, today. When I was a kid, today was called Armistice Day, because it began as a commemoration of the end of The World War, which was later known as World War I for the sadly obvious reason that we had a World War Two. There was always a moment of silence to mark the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Our servicemembers are often out of sight and out of mind, scattered across and around the world. Heroes and heroines in uniform are making a difference every day in more ways imaginable, allowing all of us to somnambulate with our eyes open, as we don't see the lives we could have led because of the incessant assault we endure.

It's a new world and a new generation, but those making the sacrifice are the old souls who have always borne the burden--not just those at locations marked with dots on the map of countries we cannot name, but all those who whet the blade of the sword they wield in our name in defense of everything we are and will ever be.

As a nation, we are more filled with self-doubt and profound conflict than at any time in at least my lifetime. There will always be light and dark, but we shall prevail because we must. For anyone, anywhere, now or then, in uniform who placed service over self, whenever and wherever that is and was, thank you.

Sometimes we forget the very words we meant to say-but as long as we don't forget those who earned that gratitude, we will always be worthy of their sacrifice.

-bill kenny

Lettuce All Take a Deep Breath

I have a celery problem, sort of. 

Whenever I'm at the grocery store, I buy a head of celery because I enjoy dipping the individual stalks into ranch dressing or covering them in Aldi peanut butter (my favorite brand). 

Except once I'm home and have put the celery away, it tends to stay away until at some time down the line, while rummaging through the refrigerator, I discover a wilted and dessiscated head of celery that I'd forgotten about.  Ewwww.

I know, 'so stop buying it!' But it's healthy and good for me, when/if I  remember to eat it (maybe not so much with the peanut butter on the stalk, but it's so good!), and eating it makes me feel pretty. And not just celery, and not just feeling pretty. 

Between us, I know it's science, but that article doesn't make scents.
-bill kenny

A Lesson Seemingly Unlearned

For us, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, it's a weekend after a non-holiday holiday (Halloween) and before an actual holiday (Veterans Day) that many of us confuse with a different one (Memorial Day). Good luck wrestling with all of that.

A trans-oceanic flight east away, on the continent where both of this earth's two world wars began, Europe, today for Germany, sitting in the middle of Europe, the ghosts of its past have never been nearer or more real, and the danger greater when we speak of Kristallnacht.

What lessons its citizens and, by extension, the rest of us, learned (and continue to learn) from it should tell each of us perhaps more than any of us is comfortable knowing. Speaking only for me, I very much like to learn, but I will also concede that I don't always enjoy being taught.

If the above-mentioned is your first encounter with Kristallnacht, by all means, use the link provided and start on your journey. And understand you are staring into Konrad's Heart of Darkness. It will look and sound familiar, as it should, because its twin beats in each of our own chests, and no matter how far and fast we run, we will never outdistance our own past.

What follows are some thoughts on Kristallnacht, an event that, having stood (a lifetime ago) in many of the spots where atrocities happened, I still cannot grasp or comprehend. I hope, should you read on, you will agree 'never again' is the only conclusion that can ever be drawn, and resolve to remember that.

If the Shoah, The Holocaust, was an unfinished symphony of genocidal annihilation for Europe's Jews (and it was only unfinished because the rest of the world finally wrested the controls of the killing factories from the True Believers before they achieved their Endlosung), then November 9, 1938, the first notes of the overture to that murderous symphony, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), were played.

When you listen to the softly told tales of survival, often by the purest of coincidences, if you have a heart, it is sickening, and if you have a conscience, it is outraged. But to keep the next exercise of extreme intolerance from ever reaching this point, we all need to retain the memories of the events as well as the circumstances that allowed the events to happen.

The Nazis did NOT leap out of bed eighty-seven years ago, causing the German nation, the land of Luther, Schiller, Liszt, and Beethoven, to lose its collective mind and forfeit forever its own soul.

For decades leading up to this day in 1938, and not just in Germany, but all across Europe, East and West, the systemic and systematic marginalization of Jews, apartheid before that word was in fashion, was in practice and a part of everyday life. The Nürnberger Gesetze of 1935 helped dull all Germans to the slaughter to come.

The ability to use language in reducing those who are the object of your animus to something somehow less human than yourself, so that the acrimony and injury inflected upon them has no more consequence than stepping on a bug, is a critical tool in the creation and construction of the crematoria and concentration camps and no less vital to that than the jackboots and the armbands.

You have a lot on your plate today-it's the weekend and the holidays are coming. Finding the time to go online or to your local library and invest an hour into researching the decay and depravity that began with Kristallnacht is asking a lot, I know. So how about a deal?

What if you and I promise one another to take an additional breath before using a racial epithet to characterize someone on the other side of the political spectrum with whom we disagree? Or to refrain from suggesting (at the top of our lungs) what a person with whom we are arguing may attempt to do with her/his logic and conclusion, as anatomically difficult as it might prove to be.

Instead of counting to ten, we try to count to eleven, and then twelve, and just keep counting until the gorge in our veins recedes just a bit and our blood has gone off its boiling point. And, most importantly, when we see someone else in mid-screed, we mitigate and mediate to help assure a more rapid return to civil and civic discourse in our interactions with one another.

Germany was not a nation of Nazis on Kristallnacht-they were in the minority even when in power. It isn't so much just the sins committed on this day that should live in infamy forever, but rather the sins that could have been prevented had two or more people joined and raised their voices in opposition. We must never forget the lesson of what happened next.
-bill kenny