REFER TO GREY by Robert Greigos © 2013

Differences

Tue, 21 May 2013 15:37 -0400

Immigration reform is a major topic of concern in Washington DC these days. Per Reuters, proposed legislation was amended in Senate committee Monday to require finger printing of all non-citizens upon both entering and exiting through our nation's 10 busiest airports. It's an effort to quash visa overstays, a significant proportion of undocumented immigration to this country. Most EU countries are also considering immigration reform. Jordan and Turkey are in distress dealing with influxes of refugees from conflicted Syria. The list goes on and on. National borders across the globe are in the process of both breach and refortification. "Keep all those ... out!!", the reactionary fervor resounds. (Insert your own favorite term of derision here.)

It's both sad and disturbing. The notion of differences, though, goes much deeper than citizenship. From early grade school, we pick on those who are different. We tease, ridicule, and ostracize them until they either remove themselves from our purview or "prove" themselves worthy of inclusion within our midst. (There is a fascinating adult version of this dynamic described in the short story Outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte.)

It's curious as to why this seemingly innate tendency to discriminate has proven so difficult to restrain. In actuality, diversity is a net advantage for both species and ecosystem. The contrary is also true. Sameness weakens and renders more vulnerable both social and ecological systems. They do not adjust well to stress. They show both limited flexibility and limited ability to adapt. The same holds for education. The more education an individual has, the more options he or she has dealing with problems and stresses. The more inflexible one's ideas and thinking, the fewer options one has attempting to cope.

Still, we laugh at, scorn, fear, throw stones at, or are appalled by those who appear different. How very cruel and undermining of our own welfare. May we all, much sooner than later, outgrow this unfortunate debilitating immaturity.

El Garden d'Lusion

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:02 -0400

One of the fascinating things about photography is the way it engages the mind. While there are a number of reasons images attract and hold our attention, or fail to, pattern recognition, if it is there or not, is almost always essential. We recognize familiar shapes, familiar patterns, familiar collections of colors, textures, faces, expressions. It's part of how we make sense of our world. Recognizing what does or doesn't fit with the familiar is what gives significance to photographs.

And it isn't just what's inside a photograph that connects with what we know. It's also the context in which we view it. An image framed and hung in a gallery takes on a different meaning than if the same image is used in an ad, posted to Facebook, or found in a shoebox at a garage sale.

It's also true that, internal to any image, organization works to both attract and focus our attention. There is cropping or framing to limit our gaze. There is point of view created by the angle of sight and distance from the subject, i.e. close up or far away. And there is composition that relates internal elements to each other and to the proportions of the frame. Most of the time, however, image organization is not the purpose of the image, but the device by which its subject is revealed to us. The photographer may not even realize how he or she is using image organization in the making of his or her photographs. Regular viewers, however, may recognize such tendencies as characteristic style.

The image above was not created with any particular forethought. It was seen and rendered rather intuitively. In looking at it later, I noticed things. For one, I realized what I'd actually photographed was a small garden in the making, earth turned and cleared ready for seed, fenced off with nylon mesh to keep intruders out. Quaint. I then noticed something interesting. I noticed the organization of the image. I noticed a pattern of interlocking L's. And then I noticed L's were everywhere in the image, making up panels on the walls, window frames and shadows, triangles and rectangles, roof lines and grass lines, even the texture of the corrugation. Then I noticed that right there in the midst of all those interlocking L's was a circle and the French curve of a piece of yellow hose echoed in distortions of the corrugation. A complete contrast to all the rest. How strange, strange that it all seemed to work together. And how strange that without even intending to, some part of this photographer's brain perceived that scene as organizable in that particular way, and then proceeded to fix that organization in a photograph. It's virtually certain not every photographer would perceive and organize that particular scene in quite that way.

The question now is: does anyone else see what I see in the image above? And if so, doesn't it make you curious about our brains, about how we perceive and make sense of things? And about how we might get fooled or maybe sometimes delude ourselves just because the pieces of things seem to fit together nicely?

May the garden of your thoughts be well grounded in things reliably real and not just fabricated upon arbitrarily interlocking pieces of information.

Real Americans Don't Need Guns

Sun, 05 May 2013 10:25 -0400

This weekend's NRA convention has yielded some peculiar assertions. For instance, attendee T.J. Scott was quoted by NPR's Wade Gooodwyn as saying: "My belief is that the Second Amendment was put in not to hunt, not to go plink at cans, not to shoot at targets. If and when tyranny tries to take over our country, we can fight it."

What makes that assertion peculiar is the underlying assumption that belief is truth. Generally, people associate religion with belief and speech with opinion. However these days, with so many feeling freedom of passion, there is a tendency to confuse the two. And hardly anywhere is the nature of truth being considered.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does in fact state that Congress shall make no law prohibiting free exercise of religion or abridging freedom of speech. One might generally conclude from those words that Americans may speak their opinions freely and behave according to their religious beliefs without obstruction. But things are not quite that simple. There are checks and balances set up within the Constitution and within the Common Law that supports it. In other words, one cannot say just anything without being held responsible under law for both its validity and appropriateness. The same goes for behavior, religiously inspired or not. Calling one's self an American is not license to say, do, and believe anything at all, but license to act freely as long as responsibly toward one's fellow citizens.

But, what is "responsibly toward one's fellow citizens"? It is two things. It is respecting that all your fellow citizens have rights and freedoms equal to you. And, it is commitment to the processes of self-government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, that laws enacted by majority vote and legitimized by judicial decision are in fact the laws by which we all agree to behave, least our citizenship be revoked along with all its accompanying rights.

Now, if one voluntarily accepts citizenship and, therefore, responsibility toward one's fellow citizens, as well as toward the laws which they enact, can one then legitimately turn round to suggest that the will of one's fellow citizens is "tyranny"? Perhaps one can. But it is not legitimate to claim a right to own a gun implies license to partake in sedition should one suddenly feel the will of the majority is tyranny. Yet, apparently NRA attendee T.J. Scott thinks it does.

By contrast, the three young adults in the image above are on their way to work in one of America's most populous cities. They are demonstrably in acceptance of their American citizenship responsibilities, thinking, believing, listening to, dreaming of, creating, and working toward a world in which they'd want to live, all within limitations that democratic processes which they willingly participate in have established. None of them feels any need to own a gun to fend off tyranny by their fellow citizens. Though, should they be confronted by wild-eyed gun-wielding discontents who have rejected responsible citizenship, rationalizing they have a right to take things into their own hands with leverage of deadly force, they might.

May real Americans continue to explain and demonstrate to all of us that engaging in the processes of democracy is far more effective at realizing a world we'd all like to live in than dropping out of democratic processes and unholstering one's gun.