At 8:56 AM -0500 10/23/05, Don Roberts wrote:
Now to the point. I
sent the post quoted below last week and it helped for all of about
1 day. I know these are all pressing and troublesome issues but
many of us read and deal with them in other forums and our lives.
Can we get the hell back on topic here? Or isn't photography
important anymore? Has television made this all irrelevant?
Well, TV is photography by its very essence.
But it's interesting about how hard it is for us to stop talking
about this political situation we Americans have allowed to come
about.
I think it reflects that there are a lot of people really rather
worried, in a new way, unable to turn their attention aside so well
as before Katrina.
It's not just this list. I just finished reading a usenet newsgroup
I belong to of people interested in English folk music. The whole
Nelson thing has made an opening in this group that mostly talks
about how Martin Carthy tunes his guitar to accompany a song, or
which folk club in Northumberland is presenting some performer. Of
course, any discussion of Nelson as war hero can't avoid discussing
the course of British history - which brings them right back to the
mess we've made of everything we've touched in the last 5 years.
They're not exactly a conservative bunch over there, they are folkies
after all, but I suspect many of them have a better grip on their own
history than most of us have on ours. The discussion about what
benefit came to England by Nelson's showdown at Trafalgar brings them
right up against today in Iraq.
I know there are people on this list who live in what we think of as
the red states. I know I live in a bubble up here in Masschusetts.
Sometimes I think it would be good for me, as a citizen, to enlarge
my email news sources to include a paper in Charleston, Missoula and
Colorado Springs.
But if we can't let go of this dismay so many of us seem to be
feeling, perhaps we should be trying to have a real discourse with
those with other opinions?
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races, press photography
http://www.vsu.cape.com/~elf/
