As the World Runs Amuck...

​by Skip Cohen

It's Sunday morning, and as usual, I'm about to jump the rails and go completely off track from the business and marketing of photography. I've done my best all these years to stay out of the insanity that seems to be happening around me. Sheila and I even stopped watching the news since we never know what to believe anyway!

I have been left speechless by one event after another over the last few months...and if I honestly comment about how I feel about so many different issues, I'm going to sound like Archie Bunker! However, Sheila's got a great line that's so appropriate, I'm glad we're older - we won't have to put up with this crap for too much longer!  At first, I hated that line, but she's right.

Here's my point - there's no tolerance for anybody's opinion these days. America is polarized on multiple levels over dozens of issues...and the range is amazing. I can find people who will argue over their right to wear a Cleveland Indians baseball hat to a game with the same emotion and anger as somebody who believes in Pro-Choice. And at the gas pump the other day, the guy one car over mumbled, Biden sure screwed on this one! Just earlier that day, I read where Exxon Mobil reported more than double its profits for the first quarter, compared with the same period last year!

And Sheila and I are gun owners but have no issue with background checks and tighter gun control. And when Covid was at its peak, we simply wore our masks like the supermarket asked - no argument and no challenge of my constitutional rights!

Jane Conner-ziser posted the piece below by George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four on her Facebook two years ago yesterday. She shared it again and added "Interesting times!"

Was thinking of this today: Double Think: The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them....To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary.
Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

And there's my point; doublethinkers surround us!

Wishing everybody a day of simple peace and, if necessary pleasant solitude. For me, it's going to be time with Sheila and the pups, just appreciating our life together. No hard decisions, just a full heart, and soul. And to all of you, I wish nothing but the same - take a day off from whatever has the hairs on the back of your neck standing up and definitely go for long hugs. That old expression about "it takes a village" couldn't be more accurate today, and we're all the village!

Happy Sunday...or Monday on the other side of the world!