Traveling to Madison, Wisconsin last week, film maker
Michael Moore said, “America is not broke ... Wisconsin is not broke. The only thing that's broke is the moral compass of the rulers.”
Hmm.
We know that Michael Moore is not broke. He became a millionaire making dubious documentaries that attack gun owners, oil companies, General Motors (before Obama took it over), and “the rich.” We also know that he’s not starving. He’s the most corpulent communist in the country, but he’s wrong about America not being broke.
The United States government debt is over $14,000,000,000,000. President Obama’s budget will add $1,500,000,000,000 to it next year bringing it to $15,500,000,000,000. Then he proposed to do that again the following year bringing the debt to $17,000,000,000,000. After that, many of us hope he becomes former President Obama, but we’ll see.
Michael Moore is right, however, about the broken moral compass of our rulers. For example, gasoline prices go up nearly every hour. It’s getting so people are afraid to drive more than 150 miles for fear that they won’t be able to afford the gas to get home again. Still, President Obama refuses to allow oil development either on government-owned land or just off our coasts. We have enough petroleum in the ground right here in the United States to last us centuries but Obama, the Democrats and their green goons won’t let us get at it for fear there might be a spill and a sea gull might get oil on its wings. It’s all right though to send $1,000,000,000 a day to Muslim countries who use much of it to finance jihad against us in their radical quest to destroy western civilization. Our liberal Democrat rulers want fossil-fuel energy prices to go up in hopes that Americans will turn to solar panels, windmills and Chevy Volts.
Mississippi Governor
Haley Barbour said, "[T]his administration's policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive. . . . In the United States, it's harder to get a permit to mine coal than it is to get a heart transplant. . . . we are going to produce about 13 percent less petroleum in the U.S. this year than last year. Now how is that good policy at any time when energy security is supposed to be a priority, but particularly a time of turmoil in the Middle East in the oil-producing states?"
Barbour may run for president as a Republican in 2012.
Leaders who would intentionally drive up energy prices for every American do indeed have broken moral compasses as Michael Moore suggests, but that isn’t how those leaders see themselves. When they look in their mirrors, they see modern-day saviors of the world looking back because oil and coal are fossil fuels. Michael Moore, President Obama, and millions of other Chicken Littles have been predicting for decades now that we’re all going to be boiled alive by global warming allegedly caused by burning those evil fossil fuels.
Just by inserting the word “allegedly” in the previous sentence, I’ve made myself a heretic in the rigid religion of Environmentalism. I’ve become the equivalent to a Holocaust-denier, a shill for oil companies, anathema to the “Greens” - just like Haley Barbour.
People like Barbour and me are understood by the environmental saviors as suck-ups to “the rich” whom they think are ripping off everybody else on earth. Environmental saviors are also champions of “the poor” and those members of the middle class who bow at the same altars they do. They’re on the side of the public-employee unions who portray themselves as champions of ordinary Americans against “the rich.” They would save us all from the the evil intentions of “the rich” who conspire constantly to make everyone else poorer and destroy the world. Wisconsin and America “are not broke” because there are still some rich people who could pay more taxes. No matter that they’re already paying most of our federal income taxes. No matter that, according to an
article on CNBC’s web site: “[S]ocial welfare benefits make up 35 percent of wages and salaries [in America] this year, up from 21 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1960” Who do they suppose is paying for all that?
Hope this isn't a Wisconsin teacher Michael Moore and Barack Obama, both millionaires, know how much money we’re all supposed to have. They know how much is enough, how much is too much, and what amount each of us deserves. They would use government to take wealth away from “the rich” and fix everything for everybody so we can all live happily ever after driving our Chevy Volts and plugging them in every thirty miles.
Hang on America. The journey to the Big Green Paradise is going to be expensive and if you’re not broke yet, you soon will be.
It’s rare though when can I replicate what I see - especially beauty, which, as the saying goes, is “in the eye of the beholder.” What my eye sees and my camera sees are similar but never the same and neither sees the world as it really is. Objective reality exists, the perception of which I can only approach with the faculties my Creator gave me, or with the device Nikon made. I try to understand the world around me using my brain, and I try to perceive it with my senses knowing those faculties are limited and the results will always be imperfect.
It’s helpful to keep this in mind when editing pictures, which I like to do, but for which I seldom have enough time. Editing is so much easier with digital photography and cheaper too. All one needs is a computer whereas in the old days, a darkroom was necessary with enlargers and chemicals. Amateur photographers I know refuse to edit, considering the process unacceptable compromise. One won’t even crop, believing that if he didn’t frame it properly when shooting it, too bad.
I’ll bet that if I asked them, few would object to converting a color shot to black-and-white, yet they wouldn’t consider digitally enhancing colors or contrasts or brightness. I use to feel the same way about my images, but not anymore. The way I see it all now, whatever emerges in my picture-taking or my editing will be just another imperfect rendition of reality. I’ll always keep the original, however, and edit a copy. I’ll play with it to enhance whatever feeling I had that prompted me to shoot it in the first place.
Every image has feeling associated with it - if it’s my idea to take it. If I’m shooting for someone else, that probably won’t happen. To the extent I can capture the beauty of what I see, I capture the feeling with it. Others may not feel what I do when they look at it, or feel anything at all. Guess that’s because we all perceive the world differently.
If I’m shooting, then I’m right with the world. If a week goes by without taking pictures of something I’m not doing well. I’m preoccupied or I’m too busy to live as I should and I need to change something. I’ve learned that it’s a barometer I shouldn’t ignore.
Often my children and grandchildren have inspired me to pick up my camera. As infants and toddlers, they’re almost all feelings and they catalyze instinctive, reciprocal feelings in me. My daughters notice my connection to my grandchildren because their love is more intense than mine. They like to see themselves and each other as little children too. Old pictures tap old feelings.
When my children were little, I couldn’t afford color prints, so I shot a lot of slides which were cheaper and we’d have set up a slide projector to see them. That was a bother, but it did foster attentiveness. When I made prints of favorite slides, they never looked as good to me as they did when projected onto a screen in a darkened room. Today, I much prefer to see my images on a back-lit computer screen than as a print on photo paper. I’ll enlarge some, frame them and hang them up, but I’m less satisfied with the result. I prefer them on a high-definition TV screen, and if I ever become more prosperous, I’ll purchase some of those large, framed LCD panels to display my images where I live and work.
Here’s hoping I never again go off unprepared to capture whatever the world would show me.
