Horrible Persons

I'm looking at the other  screen in front of me showing a photograph taken a hundred years ago of a marketplace in some provincial European town that I couldn't for the life of me place on a map.  Trucks, dirt, roofs of sellers' stands - the camera  is stationed overhead, we can't see what's being sold - people milling about, some of them looking back at the cameraman, a lost world.  All long dead by now.

I once made a similar comment about another old photograph, and was met with somebody's instant reaction, "You're a horrible person, if that's the first though that comes to your mind". Well, it wasn't and it isn't the first thought, but I do think that it is horrible to call somebody a "horrible person" for making such innocuous  observations.

There are so many photographs taken today everywhere you go that it isn't likely many of them will be as fascinating to people one hundred years from now as the ones from a hundred years ago.  And no one looks back at the cameraman as they did then.   This world will be lost too, though.

But I and many others I know more or less, are deemed "horrible persons" today to members of their families, to their friends, or I should say former friends for exercising their right to vote in recent elections, and voting not according to the way these friends and family members expected them to vote.  There is a large contingent of self-appointed moralizers, church ladies on high horses, saintly do-gooders, ideologues of Utopia, all  wagging fingers and condemning others to hell for voting the way they voted.  All of them, as far as I can tell, from among the educated classes.

A commentator I read yesterday says we are in the start of a Second Civil War in America.  I'm betting on horrible persons.

Passing

My friend and peer died yesterday. We haven't been in touch for years, decades even, and he was the one who broke off contact way back when over some political disagreement, but we, I'd like to think,  respected each other, each other's talents, plus the fact that we were age peers - he was older by a few months - hit me hard, and reminded me of my own mortality once again, and that, as they say, we're not long for this earth.  What can you do? I am sorry we never reconciled.  (Laugh if you have to when I say I was friends with a man I hadn't seen for decades!)

In the meantime, as I am looking at a photograph I took today  of my grandson running around in the rain in the backyard of the house, a photograph that is staring at me from the other screen, and I am thinking of how and if I can protect this precious being from the madness of the two women in this house, who, well.  'nuff said.