The news is so evil and demoralizing, that I cannot process it. I try, to the best of my ability, to avoid watching, listening, or reading about it. I can’t fix it, so all it does is make me angry and upset. I avoid it but am not always successful. Even comedy shows are dangerous. Comedians mention current events and I don’t want to know.
Refugees greet their new nation.
I seem obsessive about taking pretty pictures rather than discussing what I’m thinking. I’m not so much obsessive as trying desperately to avoid dealing with a reality I find too awful to confront. I’m trying to NOT think about anything meaningful. Can you blame me?
I really deplore what’s going on this election year. I am sickened that racism has become okay if not outright trendy. Catch the code words people use that are thinly disguised hate-speak. They fool no one but themselves.
The ocean liner Queen Mary passes the Statue of Liberty as she enters New York Harbor after completing her first voyage to the United States on June 1, 1936. (AP Photo)
Today … again … hating immigrants is fashionable, expressed by people whose parents and grandparents were themselves immigrants. ALL of us are immigrants — really, worse than immigrants. We are despoilers who dispossessed and slaughtered the native population to take their lands and destroy them.
President Franklin Roosevelt, speaks on the 50th anniversary of the erection of the State of Liberty in New York, on Oct. 28, 1936. He declared that, “To the message of Liberty which America sends to all the world must be added her message of peace.” (AP Photo/Preston Stroup)
Who granted us that right? It seems we granted ourselves the right. We wanted it and declared it our God given right to grab it. To the best of my knowledge, God never weighed in on the issue. More’s the pity.
We have an ugly track record and much to answer for, something we completely ignore as we self-righteously treat newcomers to this country as if we ourselves are not the bloodiest of intruders.
I take pictures of waterfalls and trees. Of the oncoming of a new season that I hope does not herald another appalling chapter in man’s inhumanity to man and my reluctant participation in a process that makes me alternately depressed and ashamed.
A steady stream of tourists from everywhere in the U.S. and many from foreign lands, visit the Statue of Liberty (background) in New York August 4, 1946 which rises from an almost 150-foot pedestal. This height of the base of the 152-foot figure was necessary to make Miss Liberty impervious to the high winds of the bay. (AP Photo/FS)
As my neighbors … the people who wave the flag of which I’d like very much to be proud … spout words that are mindless repetitions of crap they’ve heard on propaganda machines like Fox news, I wonder what went wrong? How come we seem to have bred a generation of morons too stupid to recognize their own best interests? Do they realize that they are spitting on the flag they claim to love?
As a nation, we have lost ourselves. We have traded our souls to the Devil … and I hope we have one Hell of a long spoon, because as you may recall, dining with the Devil rarely works out well for the dinner guests.
Our flag flies over our local Revolutionary War era cemetery in the middle of town.
As for me, I’m back to pictures of waterfalls and autumn leaves. They won’t hurt me. They remind me that the earth somehow endures, despite our best efforts to kill it. Maybe our nation will survive too, even though we seem determined to destroy all the good we ever represented.
Related articles
- Study: Fox News Viewers Hold More Anti-Immigrant, Anti-Latino Views (alternet.org)
- Allergic to Facts… or Maybe It’s a Disease (aglobalpolitico.com)
- Can We Learn To Forget Our Memories? (wnyc.org)
- Homeland Security: Forget the Border, We Have Americans to Bust (godfatherpolitics.com)
- Takedown: Deport Them All! (persephonemagazine.com)
- Immigrants Can’t Save U.S. Cities by Themselves (bloomberg.com)
