It's Not the "End of Summer"

 Happy (?) Labor Day.

Valerie June

Phil Ochs

Sweet Honey in the Rock

-bill kenny

In the Spirit of the Season...

Labor Day 2024. 
Robber Barons, Mega Banks and Wall Street: too much. 
Working Poor, Middle Class and Main Street: never enough.

There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks
And the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come 'round
She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union, I'm sticking to the union.
Oh, you can't scare me, I'm sticking to the union,
I'm sticking to the union 'til the day I die.

This union maid was wise to the tricks of company spies,
She couldn't be fooled by a company stool, she'd always organize the guys.
She always got her way when she struck for better pay.
She'd show her card to the National Guard
And this is what she'd say

You gals who want to be free, just take a tip from me;
Get you a man who's a union man and join the ladies' auxiliary.
Married life ain't hard when you got a union card,
A union man has a happy life when he's got a union wife.

Now I'm a union man, amazed at what I am. 
I say what I think, that the company stinks. Yes, I'm a union man

When we meet in the local hall, I'll be voting with them all.
With a hell of a shout, it's "Out brothers, out!" and the rise of the factory's fall.

Oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die. Until the day I die.

The union has made me wise to the lies of the company spies
And I don't get fooled by the factory rules 'cause I always read between the lines

And I always get my way if I strike for higher pay
When I show my card to the Scotland Yard and this is what I say:

Oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.

Before the union did appear my life was half as clear
Now I've got the power to the working hour and every other day of the year

So though I'm a working man I can ruin the government's plan
And though I'm not hard, the sight of my card makes me some kind of superman

Oh, oh, oh, you don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.

You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
You don't get me, I'm part of the union.
Until the day I die.
Until the day I die.
-bill kenny

No Hallmark Card to Mark the Day

This is International Overdose Awareness Day. There will be a lot of speeching, preaching, perhaps some though not much teaching  and a large amount of writing (better than this I hope) as well as pearl-clutching about 'the problem.' 

I’ve never pretended to myself or others that living in Norwich is close to life in the fast lane or being a Big Noise in the Big City, and there’s no tone of regret when I say that. I’ve discovered I enjoy watching the Big World from the pages of a newspaper or via a TV newscast.

More than once in a while, sometimes it feels like more than once in a week, I’ll read about something or watch a report on a Six O’clock News and shake my head at what seem to be wild times somewhere else. There’s a lot to be said for living in Safe as Houses, Eastern Connecticut.

But no matter how often I shake my head, or (and I’m not proud to admit this) try to close my eyes, we have a public safety threat and, quite frankly, a public health crisis right here and now, substance abuse overdose. Let me repeat that for those in the back: It's NOT a problem, it's a public health crisis and we cannot begin to hope to solve it unless and until we admit it that it is. 

You’ve read the police reports, and more on point, the obituaries of neighbors and family members whose lives have ended because of overdoses, but we're really not accepting that it's happening here, where we live. 

If you think of your own circle of friends and acquaintances and do not know someone, or of someone, whose life has been shattered by a tragic overdose (and there are no other kind) you are very fortunate. Or, more likely, you are kidding yourself.

And substance abuse overdose is a plague whose growth no single agency or program can halt or slow. It is a ravenous fire dangerously close to out of control that will consume all that we love and all that we are if we do not sit together, speak from our hearts  about causes and solutions and truly listen to those who can help us end this horribly human tragedy.

This needs to stop being a yet another sad day on the calendar and instead, a call to arms.
-bill kenny

The Pump Don't Work

Dylan nailed it. 

"Get sick, get well Hang around a ink well Ring bell, hard to tell If anything is goin’ to sell.

Try hard, get barred Get back, write braille Get jailed, jump bail Join the army, if you fail.

Look out kid You’re gonna get hit But users, cheaters Six-time losers Hang around the theaters.

Girl by the whirlpool Lookin’ for a new fool Don’t follow leaders Watch the parkin’ meters."

"Ah get born, keep warm

Short pants, romance, learn to dance Get dressed, get blessed Try to be a success

Please her, please him, buy gifts

Don’t steal, don’t lift Twenty years of schoolin’ And they put you on the day shift."

-bill kenny

Have a Poster

There's an old joke about how going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than sleeping in a garage doesn't make you a car.  

I can no longer hear the laughs over the sounds empty stomachs make.
-bill kenny

Jump

Even if you are no more than a casual reader you know that where I live now is not where I was born. I was born in New York City. My parents and their friends moved to New Jersey when I was a toddler.  Jersey was one of two places that Eisenhower-era young married New Yorkers (YMNY) moved to when they had a few bucks.

When YMNY had MORE than a few bucks, they moved to Connecticut, to the Gold Coast, not this part of the state, east of the Connecticut River and almost in Rhode Island. Until the two Native American casinos came along, this part of the state was known for Mystic, on either side of 95 North as folks headed to Cape Cod for their vacations.

There a lot of places in the new england (deliberately without capital letters) built along the banks of rivers that powered the textile factories that disappeared in the late Forties and Fifties because cheaper labor in the Deep South shifted the industrial footprint only to be, in turn, destroyed by even cheaper labor half a world away.

This new england doesn't suffer from Future Shock, but present shock. There are many here who hold on to the past so tightly, believing it will return though they know not how, that they cannot understand how much life and times have changed or how far behind they have fallen.

They watch with a mixture of suspicion and hope as every 'new' person or 'new' idea is presented as The Next Big Thing and when that definite article proves to be less than advertised, their feelings change from disappointed to deceived, and they neither forgive nor forget.       

Much of what I’ve seen in Norwich in the three-plus decades I and my family have lived here is a change in the direction of the circles in which we run. As if the running were itself a plan. We elect new brooms to sweep old dust-or choose old brooms to leave the dust alone. It makes no difference, least of all to the dust.

We were talking about downtown revitalization when I arrived here, and we're still doing it-and that's NOT accidental. People prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that are not.

Those of us who didn’t grow up here will never be “from here” no matter how long we live in Norwich. Every discussion about this city becomes ‘this is a Norwich thing, and you don’t understand.’  
Maybe.

But here’s something all of us can understand about those of us not from here: we are less wedded to a past we never had and more willing to risk our present for a desirable future for ourselves and our families. It’s the New Math: the less you have, the less you have to lose.

It’s not that, as a city, we haven’t meant well in Norwich. We have had armies of people, on a variety of committees, commissions, agencies and boards, each with a tiny piece of the economic development puzzle, struggling to make a breakthrough and somehow hit a game-winning grand slam home run.

And plans! Brother, Sister-there are rooms in our City Hall where you can't swing a wombat, or other small animal, and not hit yet another development study, nicely bound, never read, right on a shelf. 

Words, to include these, are only words. Ability, agility, and most of all action are what matter. Do something.
-bill kenny

The Portal to Paradise?

As a retired elderly man with no discernible or marketable skills, I spend a lot of time with my desktop computer often to no avail. Like so much else of all the machinery that comprises my scenery, the desktop computers in my life have a tendency to do what I tell them instead of what I want. 

I suppose I should be grateful I don't have voice activated software for them because in my case, I'd need to replace the Idiot's Guide with the most recent update to Masters and Johnson, since many of my voice commands would be anatomically and electronically nonexecutable.

I stare into the depths of the blue screen of death a half dozen or more times a day-O death where is thy sting, I sing; well, actually it doesn't sound very much like singing when I do it but you get my drift. I've endured countless admonitions that I've attempted an "illegal operation" as the PC shuts down and goes dark to teach one of us a lesson (all of which is wasted on me).

There's little in life less worth living than being judged to be nonresponsive. Empires have been overthrown for less and voyages of exploration have been undertaken to avoid its curse. I used to always click "Send Error Report" no matter what had happened or when it occurred because somehow, I just knew the boys and girls of Microsoft were sitting in their operator cubicles on pins and needles in downtown Redmond, Washington, waiting to read about the background of my latest computational catastrophe. Together, we would become better people and programs.

Not exactly as it turns out. Slowly, as time went by and the same stupid nonresponsive program messages kept popping up, it crossed my mind that The Gates Gang wasn't especially quick on the uptake or why else would the same program error keep happening. It wasn't like I was getting any smarter at screwing things up. Nope, not me. I had pretty much flat-lined on the learning curve.

And while even in the most recent of times I'm still generating computer error messages by the bushelful, I always opt now for "Don't Send." It's as close as I can get to going commando in a spam-filled virus infested phishing pool. I need a unit to sample and hold-but not an angry one. A new design, a new design. 
-bill kenny