Mike M's blog

…I was just a boy, not quite ten years old, but I heard the grown folks when they talked about the young guy with the big ideas and different ways of doing things who happened to be President of the United States.  Though it doesn’t seem like much nowadays, back then it was a big thing that he bothered to speak, even clandestinely, with people like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., about things that were pretty much not acknowledged publicly  - like racial inequality.
Another thing the grown folks talked about was that young guy’s audacity in how he approached people and situations that he wasn’t supposed to be experienced enough to deal with; boldly, with a sense of history, progress, and great faith in people – or at least the better angels of our nature.  A man of vision, energized by a sense that it was high time for great change, he’d gone to Berlin and addressed the people – Ich bin ein Berliner! – and continued to step into those places and do those things conventional wisdom declared were beyond him because of his age or his backfround and circumstance; though he was a decorated World War II hero, and despite his education at the best schools.
That man’s days ended in the Fall after his Berlin trip, and for me and many of those I grew up with, my country lurched into a pause with his untimely passing, and the time instead moved erratically backwards as that great progressive sea change which seemed promised to us – to the world – instead appeared on the stage as some hollow facsimile marked by dissension, repression, and the cynically expedient politics of false consensus, camouflaged by slogans and nationalistic fervor dangerously close to those horrors that characterized the myopic political economics that gave us two Great Wars during the 20th Century.
As I happened upon this stone monument in the museum campus I was suddenly aware of the sense that the time has returned when that great sea change might finally occur, or as Senator Barack H. Obama says “This is our time” – the time that lurched suddenly to a stop on a cool and sunny afternoon in Dallas Texas USA; when fear’s grip snaked and slipped silently around the throat of our consciousness and lingered there, with just enough pressure to remind us vaguely of its presence, just enough to color our impressions as we lay down our suddenly too-heavy hopes of brightness.
I recall that he was not my first choice – “he seems to be a good enough person, but -he didn’t wait his turn” – but he does seem to have stepped forward in our time -  and Time waits for naught…

http://www.ipernity.com/doc/commortis/2515839

Well, as much as I have resisted it, this blog craze endures, and despite my reluctance I have discovered one or three that were interesting or provocative or humorous or otherwise worthwhile glimpses into the psyche of those minds so unfettered by the bounds of humility that they might share the mutterings and wanderings that occur behind their eyes that would otherwise remain anonymous and unexamined by the otherwise oblivious mass of humanity despoiling and populating this great whirling ball as it hurtles through the void.

(Certainly, the above had some intent of meaning when conceived in my boiling gray matter - perhaps it is there somewhere obscured by the pretension.... - or perhaps it is you...)

Anyway.

         Finding myself still starved for attention as an actual photographer, despite my passion for the medium and ownership of at least marginally respectable equipment, I have determined that the answer may be more active participation here in ipernity - which seems to be some sort of rival or aggressor inhabitant of web space mapped out by fl-kr and several other photo-"sharing" sites.  While not overt, I do seem to detect some hostility or ribald rivalry ( or perhaps it is me....) to any hint of acknowledgment of the existence of the f- site by this combo photo-blog-video- viral whatever place that I wander with increasing intrigue.

Hopefully, I will discover a community here, and somehow, while not necessarily "fitting in" so much, I will still manage to avoid some sort of permanent banning or otherwise excite feelings of offense in that great mass of humans around this planet with whom I hope to exchange the occasional how-do, or even fare-thee-well....