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| A salty inlet • June, 2019 |
Pre-teen boys racing. Families yelping. Girls ready for the next heat. Hot-June summer morning. Squinch your eyes so color streaks against salty air and life is giggling, screaming, joy-filled fun. This is the sort of image these kids will access from their memory storage bins 20, 30, 60 years from now.
As winds of age scour my memories, well... So will I but... um... well... maybe next year?
So we're in an election cycle right now and so many of the candidates seem determined to paint things with an "awful" brush. They explain how we're neck deep in a dystopian pool of cess. Not to worry, they've got plans, strategies, policies that will drain away some of the stinky shit that's stained everything. And yet... Boys and girls play in the sun... colored streaks against salty air and life's giggling, screaming, exciting fun.
Hyperbole's selling all sorts of contention. But that image up there's not grabbed from some legend of a distant time. Unless we've already forgotten the summer that's right now turning to the dazzle of kids wallowing in piles of jewel-colored leaves. Uh-huh there are places where things aren't as charming... I know that. And I confront that in every news story streaming across my monitor.
But maybe... just maybe... a footrace, a ball game, a kayak scramble, a young couple swinging their hands ought to, just on some rare occasion, come out of the media gate?
GEEK STUFF: Canon 7D Mk. II through its EFS 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens. I'd switched on follow-focus spotted on the boat. Post processed in PSCC 2019 to expand the dynamic range then finished in both Topaz Impression together with Alien Skin's Snap Art 4. Oh, Alien Skin's changed their name to Exposure Software.
3 comments:
Hmmm ... for the vast majority of people, the first two thirds of Hitler's reign were terrific. A vast improvement over what was before. For their children? Time of their life.
Or, less offensive, Trump being what he is, does not obliterate the sun. But he still hurts. Not necessarily you.
Wow! I was making no. political statement, rather that the world goes on for a vast.. vast majority, regardless of political and cultural positions in ways that overlap in friction. Some seem to believe that somehow our President is a deranged madman inflicting at this moment horrors upon his people and the world. Others seem to believe that systemic blockages have built up that the President is either attempting to dismantle or to restructure so that certain of their hopes, dreams, and desires can be achieved.
Regardless of those stormy interactions, in fact while most may increasingly see more of the world through a political lens... the US is, most of the time a place where they go to work (lowest unemployment rates and highest labor force participation rates in about 60 years), love their friends and sweep the Autumn leaves (metaphor my friend) while trying to avoid being trivialized. Media always ramps mediacirculation, audiences, and now clicks by finding blood on the sidewalk - but in a nation of 350 million people the blood is so rare that it makes its occurrence into a man-pbites-dog oddity but it's oddities not the normal that grab clicks.
Interesting that a droll image like this one along with a text which regrets election-year hyperbole is abrasive enough to bring Hitler (!) onto the stage of your mind. I'm sorry that happened, not intended my friend. But as always, I'm glad to trigger a serious thought.
Hmm ... I know what you want to say. I know it very well.
Let's put it this way: both of us are in the comfortable position of not being impacted by what's happening at the periphery of the Empire, but I am probably nearer.
And this is not necessarily about Trump. He is just a monstrous culmination.
At the age of 17, in 1982, Irene joined a six weeks trip with several other members of an evangelical youth club. The expedition was led by a priest and history teacher. One adult. In two VW camper vans they drove through Italy, on ferry across the mediterranean, through Tunisia, Algeria, the Sahara down to Tamanrasset, and then through Morocco, across to Gibraltar, and back through Spain and France.
The years before he led other youth groups to Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Irresponsible? It was perfectly possible. The periphery of Europe was stable and safe.
Today, after bombing the hell out of Iraq and Libya, after making a Cambodia out a Syria, and with the support for Saudi slaughter in Yemen, with constant threats against Iran, one of the few countries in the area, that has not started a war in a long time, today you couldn't do most of those trips with adults.
Yes, I know it's not the US alone. France and the UK have always joined if they had the chance to do so. Libya is an egregious case. Heck, I suppose Austria would join if we had the means!
Still, it's your Empire, you are leading. And it's not a good direction. And I see no improvement, only a slide down a very slippery slope.
Now maybe it's a little clearer, why the insistence on everything being mostly alright sometimes comes across as a little offensive :)
Hmm ... maybe I'm just a little grumpy these days. I should take more photos. It's a wonderful, climate-changed autumn around here :)
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