The Sadness of Silence

It was Shakespeare's Macbeth, who may have been the first literary figure to offer an argument on the virtue of planning your work and then working your plan, when he offered, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day..."

In addition to its eloquence, it's memorable for both its utility and applicability-though in an era of diminished expectations and shortened attention spans it's easy to understand how quickly we can seem to get lost as individuals and as political units from cities to our national government.

There's always more than one way to get from here to tomorrow. The more successful paths seem to often involve inspiration and perspiration in nearly equal amounts, that is, a brilliant insight or an original idea combined with hard work. And don't forget, some good luck. 

Our Mayor earlier this week held the first meeting of his Community Interest Panel to accelerate the process. The comments on the newspaper article are hilarious, to me, as they prove that it takes more power to be a light than a horn (and we have plenty of horns in Norwich)

My father was fond of invoking the Pennsylvania Dutch as the source of one of his favorite expressions, "the harder I work, the luckier I get," but I defer to wherever your mom or dad say they heard it, too. 

Luck, like hope, is a four-letter word and both of them have that in common with a plan. But critical to any plan are having definite, precise, and clearly defined goals with a strategy of how to use the tools at your disposal to achieve those goals.

Without all of that, a plan is just a wish you make with your heart. And while that worked out very well for Jiminy Cricket, we're having a critical shortage of wishing stars right now, so we'll have to make do the old-fashioned way. For what it's worth, don't take Pinocchio to any of the seafood nights at local restaurants, at least not for the next few weeks.

There have been enough words written on "how to get our city back on track" where we each insert the name of where we live, step two paces back and admire our handiwork, seldom realizing that a good beginning is only that, a beginning.

Articulating a plan means making sure that everyone who needs to be on board with it, and that usually means everyone where you live, understands what you're sharing, the reasons for what you're proposing, the impact of the sacrifices they will need to make for a common good, and then to get on board with the program and own the plan for themselves. All or nothing at all.

Top down, bottom up, there's no one path because there's no one destination-only a journey that has a beginning each day and never ends. The only constant in our world has always been change and the need for change. 

There's never an end to progress-only pauses along the way, and no matter what happened yesterday, tomorrow will be here in a moment and care not about those successes and failures. We can learn from them, and we can build on them, but we can't live forever on their memory or their meaning. 

As Banquo admonishes, "if you can look into the seeds of time, and say which grain will grow and which will not, speak." Far too often, all that remains is silence."

-bill kenny

Remembering the Dream

Today, August 28, 1963, The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on a hastily constructed platform in front of the Lincoln Memorial at The National Mall in Washington, D. C.. For a moment on that day, America stopped to listen. Today we can be forgiven if some wonder how much any of us have heard. 

Dr. King was the final speaker at what was, at the time, the largest day-long civil rights rally in American history, a rally that demanded, not asked for, "jobs and freedom." It attracted a quarter of a million people who heard a powerful declaration of purpose that King himself had titled "Normalcy-Never Again." 

The normalcy of the United States as our nation's capital simmered in the late summer heat that summer was very much a separate and even more different nation than the one in which we awoke this morning. And yet it is very much the same. 

While for some of us, the events of 1963 could just as well be those of 1863, because they seem so long ago or, for some, before we were born, it is for many just the turning of a page, a look back both in sorrow and in anger at broken and battered lives as well as at missed and misspent opportunities. 

The United States of 2026 struggles with so many of the same challenges. What we have learned (or should have) is that poverty, of the soul or of a bank balance, has little interest in or use for race, creed, or color. Money doesn't talk; it swears. 

Thanks to our politics of division and divisiveness, many of us have become harder people, less willing to give, to share, and even less interested in caring about the rights of those like, and often unlike, us who are our neighbors and fellow-citizens. In some ways, the snapshot has yellowed but hasn't changed all that much in all those years.

Dr. King's America on that August day in 1963 had, as it did every day, despite fine-sounding and high-minded efforts in ten decades since the Civil War's end, black people who were still systematically disenfranchised with more than two-thirds denied the right to vote; where 'separate but equal' was still more prevalent throughout our country than the right of access to integrated schools, public washrooms, drinking fountains or buses and trains. 

We were then, as difficult as it seems to those looking at recent Supreme Court rulings on voter rights, two nations who rarely spoke with one another about our shared goals or common ideals. 

Instead, too often fueled by fear and ignorance, we were two tribes who scrupulously avoided dialogue and discussion on an ever-growing divide of desires and aspirations. 

For those of us whose children are just starting/returning to our schools as another academic year begins, Dr. King's speech and the society and nation in which he spoke are a distant half-remembered historical dream of a long ago that disappears in the harsh daylight of Hard Times in the Land of Plenty with which so many of us must contend every day. 

It was only after Dr. King chose to speak from his heart and less from his notes at the podium that afternoon that the power, the longing, and the joyfulness for which "I Have a Dream" became famous became apparent. 

His oratory soared, carrying everyone to new heights, those present in The National Mall and the millions more who watched on televisions across the country because while TV didn't know exactly what was happening, they did know it was important. 

All these years later, Dr. King's dream is our dream. We are, at our best, a nation whose struggle in pursuit of our dreams lights the souls of those around the world and for whom we are a last, best hope. 

King never said our journey would be easy, and it isn't; nor is it over. Far from it. 

We have come a long way and yet we have a long way yet to come. We cannot get there by ourselves but only by taking the hand of the person to our left while offering ours to the person on our right-and stepping forward, together. And always. 
-bill kenny

Found A Scapegoat

Tariffs and trade wars.

The not-quite-a-war-with-Iran.

Abduction of the President of Venezuela.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) improving the performance of the Federal government.

A TV weekend anchor as Secretary of  Defense War.

Self-dealing in government contracts, stock market manipulations, and nepotistic business arrangements.

And what seems like literally hundreds of other foolish, ill-thought-out, gratuitously evil policies and actions ranging from immigration and customs enforcement through environmental protection to public education policy.   

All at the feet of Donald J. Trump. But how did he happen? 

Submitted for your consideration:

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

-bill kenny

"I Would Grow Tomatoes as Big as Beach Balls....."

I took advantage of blue skies and low humidity on Monday to visit Mohegan Park. After a rainy weekend kept most visitors away, the chipmunks and squirrels were stopping passersby on the trail around Spaulding Pond looking for handouts. I forgot to take peanuts with me. 

The looks of disappointment, disdain, and dismay were plainly visible on their faces as I tried to explain that my decision to come to the park was pretty much spontaneous after visiting the post office. They weren't interested in my alibis.

Many of us are knee-if not hip-deep in back-to-school preparation(Norwich Public Schools students don't go back until 3 September, but Norwich Free Academy gets started later this week), so, aside from moms and dads with small children, I had Spaulding Pond to myself.

Late August summer sunshine is bittersweet. It has much of the warmth of its July cousin, but also a foreboding undercurrent warning of the season's change. You can still enjoy August sunshine, just not as much as you could when summer began. 

I love Mohegan Park and used to clock four or more laps around Spaulding Pond back in my salad days. Now I struggle with my trusty Rollator to get two laps under my belt, but it's still better than none, right? 

Otis Library has set up pathway placards, ala Burma Shave roadside ads, as Story Time stations around about half the pond. I hadn't been there in a while, so I don't know how many I missed, but the current one was perfect for the weather, about a little girl deciding what to grow in her garden (I won't spoil the ending; go up to Mohegan and read it for yourself).

From what I did read as I walked from placard to placard, she is a very wise little girl with just the right combination of practicality and whimsy (not a lot of people would plant seashells, but she did), with excellent taste when it came to vegetables. 

Today's title was part of her garden but the kicker was the second line, as you made it around the bend on the far side of the pond where the egrets like to fish (there were none today, not sure why), and her thought to help me on my way was, "And the carrots would be invisible, because I do not like carrots."

Ah, if it were only that easy to handle the unpleasantness that awaits all of us once the story time ends. (And I think she meant kale instead of carrots.)
-bill kenny

Early Days

It's a fine line between childlike and childish, and I ride on it balanced like Duna on a bike in a John Irving novel. 

I was born months before Eisenhower was elected president and remember (without fully understanding) how sad everyone was when John F. Kennedy was murdered.  

My family used to watch Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color on Sunday evenings, but we made an exception the night of  February 9, 1964. I didn't know I was waiting for The Beatles. Hell, I wasn't yet twelve years old and was unaware of puberty. 

And they changed it all, not just for me but for all of us who saw/heard them and (pardon my 'OK, Boomer' attitude) for everyone who was to follow us. They didn't invent rock and roll, but for me they might well have, as I never listened to music the same way again. 

Klaus Voormann's Revolver album cover 

Pick your current favorite performer and remember how you felt when you first experienced them. Multiply it by a thousand, and then that number by a million, and then that number by a trillion, and you're still not within shouting distance of the impact of the Fab Four. 

My generation always says 'you had to be there,' when describing almost anything. In the case of The Beatles, it's a vast understatement. Even if you were there, this video can help deepen your appreciation of the four men who wrote so much of the soundtrack of the movie of my growing up. 

Yes, it's a long video, but then again, so is life. 
-bill kenny

When All Is Said and (John) Don(n)e

For a large number of reasons too boring and maudlin to get into here today, I've developed a more than healthy respect for the passage of time and its effects on me as a traveller here on the Big Blue Marble. 

I rediscovered a video over a rainy Sunday afternoon that I find both soothing AND disquieting (sort of like the Doublemint Twins). Hope you enjoy.

That it's called "Existence" is surely coincidental. Don't you agree?
-bill kenny

What If There's NO There, There?

I keep a wallet filled with foolscap, absolutely crammed. It works out well, unless you were to rob me, as there's rarely any money in it, though not necessarily because of all the foolscap.

Many years ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a little too tightly wound. That gasp of incredulity you may have heard from people who've known me for decades is legit. 

The me of Back Then makes the me of Now look comatose; I may have actually slept with my jaw ratcheted closed. I cannot imagine in hindsight why I didn't have a stroke, unless, perhaps, it's because I'm a carrier.

I couldn't let go of my anger. The Air Force, to my relief as their employee, rather than dump me amongst the flora and fauna, decided to send me to the head of the Psychiatric Services Wing at the Rhein Main (Air Base) Clinic, Colonel Doctor Robert G. He was terrific-and very funny (because he thought I was, if I'm being honest) and very willing to try to rescue a wild-eyed junior enlisted Sammy Glick impersonator who kept wading out into the deep end.

He came up with the foolscap. Every time something angered me, I was to write it down on a piece of paper and put the paper in my wallet. But every time it had to be on its own, separate piece of paper. No doubling up, no lists. By the end of the day, I could, and did, have hundreds of slips of paper in my wallet. 

No worries-I had to review ALL these slips each night and put on a different sheet of paper, all those items I was still ANGRY about (I could put those on a single piece of paper), and then I'd put that list on my nightstand. 

The night before I would go to see him at the hospital, I had to review the (six) pieces of paper, transfer anything I was still angry about to yet another piece of paper, and bring that one piece out to our weekly conversation.

Within a month, I had no lists, simply because I'd review all the slips of paper of all the things that made me angry and realized I had no idea what the heck was written on most of them or what the words I could read actually meant or concluded (after reviewing the note and thinking about it, which Dr. G. told me later was the key point) whatever had happened to spin me up wasn't that important after all.

How about this week or real soon (and I mean real soon) we all decide to try that?  Watch the news, read a newspaper, check out a social media website--we are REALLY CRANKED about a lot of stuff. 

I know people who tune in to certain TV programs just to yell at the talking head in the vapor box who is making a fortune by yelling at them. I guess they watch because it feels so good when the show is over (explains the uptick in cigarette sales, I guess). 

Others insist on reading columnists' words out loud and follow every line of the writer's argument with a scowl, or a gesture or a deprecation. And we just keep getting louder and angrier about more things, and more people every day. We don't know how to get off the aggravation escalator-and most of us don't even know we're on one.

Passion is fine and necessary. If our ancestors back in the ooze didn't care if they evolved to have legs that carried them from the pond and helped us grow lungs, every day would be Friday, if you follow my drift. 

It's the grinding though, that is wearing us out; the pitched battles we are waging to benefit who knows who or for what purpose. You wanna feel silly about how we now get along with one another, but you don't want to use the foolscap?

Okay--since we're just weeks away from the 25th Anniversary of the worst day in most of our lives, tell me five things this country was PO'ed about at eight AM on September 11th, 2001. Go ahead, I'll wait. 

Too hard? Gimme three things, then-how hard could that be? No?
You want to take a break from all this head noise and hate to concentrate on the real and important tasks at hand instead? Go ahead, I'll make a note of where we were, and we can get back to it sometime real soon.
-bill kenny