Words can and do hurt, wounding in ways unlike any other weapons ever can, without leaving visible scars.Īnd after the echo of the last of the words has died, all we can do is go on living with ourselves and the consequences of what we have done to one another.īill Kenny, of Norwich, writes a weekly column about Norwich issues. We used to joke as little kids how "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" but that, as we all know, is an obscene absurdity and a complete lie. But, when I switched over to MSNBC where there are even more people who also looked like me (and the Fox and Newsmax folks) but who most certainly were not ideologically, I had to acknowledge we're not making much progress in successfully bridging the partisan gap among us (or even trying).
I always choose to believe we have more in common than what separates us. There were a large number of exceptionally angry white men on both channels who looked like one another and looked like me all at the same time. It's not all standing on the lawn shouting at passing clouds sometimes it rains.) And surfed from the world according to Fox News to a more disquieting one according to Newsmax, which is politically more right of center than Fox but with production values more closely resembling a high school A-V club. (We retirees have a plethora of activities to fill up our days. I was thinking about all of that yesterday as I channel surfed during the afternoon. More: A lovely spring stroll around Chelsea Parade with a detour to the Lower Falls What I do recall makes me shudder and I strive to remember as little as possible for as much as possible. The old man I've been sentenced to become never existed in those fevered fantasies of the young me and I am still amazed at how well I survived that person's excesses as if that were, itself, a success. I'm grateful I don't remember more about some of those nights and the state I was in, and I am grateful beyond words for somehow not succumbing because of behavior that went well beyond "youthful indiscretion" without harming myself or anyone else. This was long before Joseph Heller's "Closing Time" was a state of mind and an attitude check. Some of us, I think, probably didn't go home, or have homes to go home to, but leave we did.
The folks who ran Olde Queens, and who probably still do, were always very patient with us, and much more kind than they needed to be (considering our age and the terrible fake IDs we all had) in moving us out when it was time to close.
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