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.