Old Billy Was Right

The game's afoot in Dodge City as The Nine Supremes prepare to hand down, or not (they are a clever bunch) a we're-serious-about-this-stuff-you-guys ruling on the constitutionality of Federal recognition of gay marriage.

Or as I like to think of it since I'm too stupid to see people in quite the nuanced and discriminatory way that others do with ease, that anyone has the right to marry anyone else. I'm not smart but this is truly a no-brainer.

Unless you're Silvia Driskill of Auburn, Nebraska, who is pursuing a lawsuit against "all homosexuals" on behalf of God Almighty and His only Begotten Son. As a lapsed Catholic the suit bothers me. I was raised to understand that God Himself can smite people, and rarely delegates that task. And when I read the full petition, my head swims, but doesn't float.

I'm thinking it's in the drinking water, whatever it is that is making us even crazier in recent years than we have been in my memory ever. Not drinking water turned into wine-don't get me started on the miracles from The Book-but wouldn't it be nice if we spent less time in simulated outrage and concentrated a little more on a small miracle of simply allowing one another to live our lives.
-bill kenny

Unless You Get Lost, You Can't Ever Be Found

I came across an Internet aphorism this weekend that I thought sounded as if it could have been written about revitalization efforts here in Norwich but it could be applied to any number of cities because we're a big country with many shared struggles that we tend too often to battle in secret.

"If you can find a path with no obstacles, it probably doesn't lead anywhere."

It seems to me that we may each be adrift in our solitary boats, but it's a large ocean and our continued fearing and avoiding of risk means sacrificing any possibility of a reward. It is of course true that if we don't do anything, about downtown, about the stagnation of the Grand List, or the challenges facing our schools, we cannot do anything wrong.

But, and sorry if this upsets fans of the status quo, we cannot be surprised when we don't get rewarded for chances we never took and opportunities we ignored. Our lives, as individuals and as residents, are the sum of the consequences of both the things we do and those things we choose to leave undone.

Having lived here in the Rose of New England for nearly a quarter of a century, I'm a thorn I suspect for residents, both long-term and less than that, who are most comfortable while Waiting for Godot and waiting for someone, anyone, to appear who will rescue them.

Cynic that I am, I endorse a notion that agrees we need fundamental change in our city, our State, etc, just as long as you leave my life alone.  George Bernard Shaw once offered that "Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their mind cannot change anything."  

As yet another budget deliberation cycle draws to a close all we seem to have learned is what we already knew (or should have known): we cannot keep doing what we have always done and expect a different outcome. The difference between a rut and a grave is too often only the depth. If we can agree on nothing else, we should and must remember an admonition of John F. Kennedy's, "...Those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future."

Each of us is quick to tell our elected representatives what we believe our city's priorities should be, sometimes in loud voices (surely only for emphasis). Those assessments are always reflections of our own perceptions of reality and in all cases, your mileage may vary.

It's time we face up to a truth that's a truism: if we want to accomplish and achieve something different than before then we must do something we have never done before. This is our moment to seize or to rue that we failed to.
-bill kenny

Historical without Becoming Hysterical

I did some research years back on the history of the observances and celebrations that many, both North and South of the (southern) border participate in today. Think of it as remedial history. 

One hundred and fifty-three years ago during the American Civil War, Union and Confederate forces squared off against one another in York County, Virginia near Williamsburg, in what became a series of battles known as the Peninsula Campaign. There was no victor but the loss of life on both sides was staggering and, more ominously, a harbinger of what was to follow. 

I mention this, because today is Cinco de Mayo which many think is Mexican Independence Day but it's not. I tend to compare it to Flag Day or more like the morning after at Fort McHenry which inspired Francis Scott Key to write the Star-Spangled Banner. 

Mexico declared its independence from Spain about thirty-five years after their Northern neighbors suggested HRH George III go pack sand and when you read the earliest histories of the two New World fledgling democracies, it was no picnic for either of us. 

By 1862, the USA was knee deep in the gore of a fratricidal war and European powers were shaking down the Mexican government attempting to collect on debts owed, shall we say, by the previous management. No nation in Europe "recognized" the Confederate States of America, but no one would have been upset had they succeeded in their secession. 

It was that desire to smash and grab that set the stage for the Battle of Puebla, which is what Cinco de Mayo is all about. French Emperor Napoleon III placed Maximilian on the newly created throne of what he hoped would be a monarchy and started to create a logistics base to better supply the Confederate States in contravention of the Union naval blockade. 

Marching from Vera Cruz to capture Mexico City and force the capitulation of the government, the much larger French army and cavalry was, instead, smashed to pieces in the mud at the Battle of Puebla, abruptly ending the dream of another French empire and also effectively cutting off the Confederate States from their chief, and clandestine, provisioners. 

A little more than a year later, at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the high water mark of the Confederacy was reached when its assault was turned back by Union forces and the inexorable end of all hostilities at Appomattox, Virginia on April 9, 1865, though not yet visible on the horizon, became inevitable. 

You don't have to be a Civil War buff to see the connection between our two nations--though it's a damn sight easier if you are so inclined. This is a good day to wish our neighbors to the South who celebrate, all the best on a day whose impact is nearly as great for both of our nations even if for entirely different reasons.
-bill kenny

Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming

Forty-five years is a long time, or in this case, a long time ago.

We were a different country from the one we are now though in some ways-the questioning, the wondering aloud, the beliefs that there are other ways to do things and to be- are now as they were then.

In the last weeks we've seen violence and dissent but forty-five years ago we saw violence in response to dissent as part of a larger argument we were having with another about an unpopular war very far away, who was being drafted to fight in it and what was to become of all of those who came home from it.

Despite the shouting of so many voices, no one had the answers but all insisted on the right to continue speaking. That's pretty easy to see now, nearly a half century later but was too hard to see at that time. I was in the spring semester of my freshman year at Rutgers College, Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Jackson State in Mississippi and Kent State in Ohio could just as easily have been on the moon or around the corner.

No matter the distance, it didn't help answer the two unanswerable questions we grew to dread until we stopped growing at all. "What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground? How can you run when you know?" Perhaps on the day we stop running we can essay an answer.

-bill kenny

Pay the Man

If you stopped by to get my take on the Floyd-Manny Pedi fight from last night, keep moving. I went to bed before it started because I needed the sleep and don't really care about a sport whose resurgence in the second decade of the 21st Century bothers me more than I can say.

That said, I'll move on to something else, something that has bugged me since the MLB season started since all of us saw the day coming when the road and the sky would collide.

Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees, in the first game of the weekend series between the Yanks and the Boston Red Sox in Fenway Park on Friday night hit a home run that tied him with Willie Mays. It also proved to be the difference in a final score of 3-2 in favor of the Yankees. Yes, I'm smiling.

For the outcomes of the 2015 season, that score is important. For lots of other people who never ever attend baseball games, that milestone is important-er. When the Yankees signed A-Rod 245 years ago (or so it seems) he had a contract with pay-offs due as/when he surpassed slugging milestones.

A-Rod is the same Yankee who was caught using PEDs and lying about their use and who sat for an entire season. I would like to point out he was a ballplayer about whom much murmuring had gone on for years previously, to include in the years before the Yankees signed him and switched him to 3rd base because they had a kid at shortstop they liked a lot-you may have heard of him, Derek Jeter.

The Yankees knew what they were getting when they signed Rodriguez.  Now Brian Cashman, who on his best day will never be Stick Michaels, the Yankees' GM, has gone on record to make it official: management/ownership doesn't feel itself bound to make good on the incentives it promised him contractually all those years ago.

I get it and as a kid who grew up a Pinstripes fan and who still doesn't see Wade Boggs, Roger Clemons or Rodriguez as Yankees, I still think the team is wrong if they stiff him. A sportswriter here in Southeastern Connecticut offered some thoughts on this very subject last week that nailed it, absolutely nailed it despite the reactions you can read in response to his position (I solved that by NOT reading them).

I fell over my own shadow in trying to put my finger on how to conclude this screed today with, of all things, some notes I offered the universe almost exactly a year ago watching the NBA, a/k/a 'millionaires in their underwear playing for billionaires who just don't care' dealing with Donald Sterling.

All I thought of at that time was the Frog and the Scorpion, and that's all I can think of now. Saintly and sanctimonious both begin with "S." And there is where the resemblance ends.
-bill kenny

(Reasonably) Happy Ever After in the Market Place

I'm told you can learn a lot from your children. Considering how dumb I am, but how much dumber I was before we had kids, I guess that's true. The education in understanding others that started when I married and then deepened with the birth of our son, developed that much more with the arrival on this day, an undisclosed number of years ago, of our daughter, Michelle.

I realized very quickly almost none of what I had learned from life with her brother would be of any use with her-except as a means of comparison. I also learned that while our two children are related to one another and to us, their parents, they are very different people. Acknowledging they are people, with their own minds, decision and lives, is a quantum leap for me and it's one I make neither easily nor gracefully.

Michelle has always been here but also somewhere else at the same time. Her pleasure at meeting you for the first time is genuine but there's a wariness to how she interacts with you until she gets to know you that makes you realize you will need to prove yourself worthy of her friendship.

As an infant, it wasn't unusual to check on her while in her crib and discover she was wide-awake, lying there silently looking at her surroundings and taking everything in. You could see the wheels turning even if you had no idea about the thoughts they were producing.

I think it was in third grade she started violin lessons and quickly demonstrated an aptitude for being able to pick up any instrument and make music with it. And it wasn't that many years ago (Einstein would perhaps be proud or not of how I've misunderstood his Relativity Theory) her mother and I visited her while she was at Eastern Connecticut State University (School motto: No, dammit, we're not UCONN).

She and her coursemates staged a brown bag lunchtime concert and she surprised and delighted us with a short piano piece played as adroitly and expertly as she plays the viola, the violin, the French Horn, the ukulele (I think) and all her other musical instruments.

Michelle is a still kinda recent graduate of ECSU, working on a half dozen side-projects to include, until the start of last summer, a community orchestra, while working a full-time job in the growthless recovery that has been New England for close to a decade.

She lives with us which could help me better realize she is a grow-up and not the infant I used to hold in the crook of my arm all those years ago as my snuggle-bunny if I were to put my mind to it. Suffice it to say she is not the only stubborn person under our roof, if you follow my drift.

Those snuggle-bunny days are forever gone, but I still have my memories. I'm hoping she would be the first to enjoy the irony of a dad who too often (for her taste) still sees her as a child, wishing her, the confident and talented adult, the Happiest of Birthdays because she's helped show me how Life Goes On.

And I'm glad the sneakers arrived early.
- bill kenny

Paging D. H. Lawrence

A glance at the calendar suggests we have a year before we vote in  the US Presidential sweepstakes. If that descriptive offends you, please come up with a more suitable one and I’ll be delighted to start using it. 

As it is, what do you think we should call it? A Beauty Pageant? A Mud-Wrestle? Laboring Greatly and Bringing Forth a Mouse? Those may have to do as I have no term not filled with contempt to describe a rigged game that neither of us will ever win, nor is/was it the intent of the game to benefit us at all. Ever. 

Don’t tell me it’s an opportunity for us to choose between our best and brightest because it’s anything and everything but that and has been for most of my life. I’m not suggesting cause and effect but we Boomers turned our attention inwards to ourselves and in case some haven’t noticed, that small, wicker container bursting into flames at our feet with a miniature globe in it, is our world going to hell in a hand basket. And all most of us can do is shrug. 

I got to thinking hard about this yesterday as Senator Bernie Sanders, a Don Quixote if there ever was one, announced he, too, would seek the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States in a contest that has long been regarded as already promised to Hillary Clinton, the former Secretary of State and former Senator from New York and oh yeah, wife of former President Bill Clinton.

I guess Sanders chose the Democrats because the Republican Party is still accepting job applications. As a matter of fact, the GOP clown car is already the size of a double-decker bus with no signs that the net cast to find interested candidates is even close to being filled. 

As you may know, and/or not care about, I’m a registered Democrat, hence the shot at the Grand Old Party, but I see myself as a relentless pragmatist, which is not a political party (yet) but really should be, who has a difficult time believing that the folks already in the arena (and bless them for that) are the best we can or should do.

Quite frankly wading in the Republican Presidential talent pool doesn’t even come to my ankles and listening to Mrs. Clinton advocate on my behalf after cashing checks of six figures for speaking engagements causes me to throw up, just a little bit, in my own mouth.

I’m not from Vermont, home of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and Phish, but the people who live there have voted consistently in large majorities for Senator Sanders every time he has offered himself for public office and while I have no illusions about his chances, I like his positions on those issues I see as important. Meanwhile back at those chances, on a sliding scale between ‘slim’ and ‘none,’ I’m thinking he only has the former on a good day, downhill with a strong tail-wind. 

But, and when, you get old as I am (which is a function of the calendar vice the maturation process) I see him as Gene McCarthy, who was the junior Senator from Minnesota at the time the senior Senator, Hubert Humphrey, was selected by Lyndon Baines Johnson as his vice-president in 1964 (Johnson/Humphrey beat Goldwater/Miller like a rented mule in the popular and electoral vote). 

Senator McCarthy declared himself a candidate, seemingly in defiance of his own party, against an incumbent President making his opposition to the war in Southeast Asia a key, though not sole, issue and built a coalition of crazies, don’t know what else to call us, who didn’t know he stood no chance so we busted butt to help him. I was sixteen and still needed a permit to shave so I’m not sure I did anyone any good but I was thrilled to be part of something that had the potential to change history. 

I’ll save you looking it up-Senator Robert Kennedy, the younger brother of the murdered President, John Fitzgerald, announced he, too, was running right after McCarthy gave Johnson all he could handle and more in the season’s first primary in Wisconsin.

Senator Kennedy was murdered in Los Angeles moments after winning the California Democratic primary and his mantle was taken up by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota who along with running mate Thomas Eagleton (and then later, Sargeant Shriver) was beaten by Nixon/Agnew in 1972 by margins even larger than the pummeling Barry Goldwater took at the polls in 1964. 

So, it wasn’t the ending for which many had hoped but it was that first taste in 1968 of the brilliance of the process and the terrifying variations of the results it produced that convinced me to subscribe to Sir Winston Churchill’s description of democracy; it’s only been in the last decades that I’ve more seriously read and then re-read George Bernard Shaw’s The Applecart.  

As for 2016, we shall see what we shall see, or what those who labor for the mass media conglomerates wish to allow us to see. When I started this screed some seven years ago, I opted to call it Tilting at Windmills. I’ve yet to get a single pony ride for my birthday, but I’ll bet I can ride a donkey which could well what I do throughout this election season. 

That, for many, it will be impossible to tell me from my beast of burden is just a small part of The Sane Revolution since as a relentless pragmatist, I hope it spreads across this nation if we are to have any hope at all of saving ourselves from ourselves.

-bill kenny